Cutting spending is basically Austerity. Specially in the current debate.

Just because it did not work, does not mean it was not Austerity.

Again magnitude is important. Austerity: conditions characterized by severity, sternness, or asceticism

Otherwise, you would call every spending cut and or reductions in future growth Austerity. If your living above your means your living the high life not practicing asceticism.

Greece needed EU loans not to pay down debt but to continue to make payroll. Defaulting would have left them with less money on day 1.

Greece has done a insane amount of spending cuts, if they are not doing austerity then nobody is and almost nobody ever has.

> Otherwise, you would call every spending cut and or reductions in future growth Austerity. If your living above your means your living the high life not practicing asceticism.

Its totally false to say that Austerity is reduction in future growth. Normally decrease in the size of government leads to better growth.

You cant take the moral definition of Austerity, in economic Austerity means spending cuts and maybe some other measures to decrease debt.

If your going to make debt reduction your benchmark, they never cut far enough to reach that point. Even ignoring interest payments their debt was always growing faster than principle + interest.

The government was spending up to 15.2% of GDP based on borrowing money. That's never going to be sustainable and a default would have also forced them to make deeper cuts.

http://www.tradingeconomics.com/greece/government-budget

Also, several other countries have made deeper cuts. It's failure to collect and raise taxes that's been Greece's issue.

>>Just because it did not work

There was no remotest chance in hell it could have worked without fixing tax evasion problems.

  > Cutting spending is basically Austerity.

Cutting spending is not austerity; saving money is the product of austerity, which is asceticism, something the Greeks are notably not known for, except for Sparta, which does not come into these tales. That there is a big difference in the two is proven by the fact Greece is still in a mess.

Also, even if Greeks do start saving, that will only handle the symptom and not the root cause, which is corruption, and corruption comes from lack of discipline, which in turn is a state that comes from a certain way of thinking, a mentality.

Ironic that the very nation which once embodied discipline and higher cognitive thinking now lacks both, is it not? I weep for Greece, truly I do.