Austerity is just another word for punishment. The corporate mass media serves us a daily diet of central bankers, government ministers, financiers and industrialists lecturing us that we must swallow bitter medicine as repentance for living beyond our means.

Those who caused the economic collapse ask everyone else to swallow the medicine, and those financial doctors are not yet done writing their austerity prescriptions. Saddled with high unemployment, a shrinking job base as production and services are steadily moved to overseas low-wage havens and a lack of incentive to invest as the products that are made can’t find a market, the solution, we are told, is: Cut wages and social programs more. Medical doctors long ago stopped using leeches and blood-letting as their primary “cure.” Mainstream economics, sadly, has yet to evolve beyond that medieval stage and its practitioners have no licenses that can be revoked.

The costs to working people who have been forced to pay for the excesses of financiers has been high in many countries. Rather than isolate individual countries, a tactic used to enable finger-wagging at Irish, Spanish, Greeks & etc., let us instead look at several countries at once, and see if we can spot patterns.

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