The acceptance of these ideas by a generation of policy makers, politicians, and economists as the common sense of the day considerably narrowed the space for any type of “spend against the cycle” compensation arguments—Keynesian or otherwise—long before the current crisis. Conversely, these arguments widened the policy space for austerity’s comeback considerably. After all, why compensate when we know that compensation only causes inflation? Why expect a stimulus to work when we know that it only ever promotes inflation and when politicians only enact a stimulus to get reelected?

Mark Blyth, Austerity, loc. 424