Austerity is founded on the fantasy that a country is like a household. That it has a certain fixed income. If it spends too much, it runs out of money and has to go into debt, and eventually those debts need to be paid. So if the household is in debt, it needs to spend less.But a national economy works nothing like that. All of our economies are based on growth, and the spending cuts made in the name of austerity reduce that growth. So the more they cut, the worse things get.