But austerity intuitively makes sense, right? You can't spend your way to prosperity, especially when you are already in debt, can you? Austerity is intuitive, appealing, and handily summed up in the phrase you cannot cure debt with more debt. If you have too much debt, stop spending. This is quite true, as far as it goes. But thinking this way about austerity neither goes far enough nor asks the important distributional questions: who pays for the reduction in the debt, and what happens if we all try to pay back our debts at one time?

Mark Blyth, Austerity, loc. 41