To be sure, economists and citizens voice valid concerns about governmental debt and national overspending (though these concerns seem to have evaporated for GOP politicians during the debate around the 2017 tax bill). Yet US austerity politics often emerge when money remains in people’s bank accounts and resources flow through the system, as if preaching a starvation diet when the stores are full of grain. In this sense, US austerity arguments do not so much ask citizens to buckle down in the name of national unity as to reallocate resources from the many to the few.
