Kieran’s father, 57-year-old Brian, had worked as a security guard in Lanarkshire, near Glasgow. The day after Christmas 2011, Brian had a stroke, which left him paralyzed on his left side, blind in one eye, and unable to speak. He could no longer continue working to support his family, so he signed up for disability income from the British government.

That government, in the hands of Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron since the 2010 elections, would prove no friend to the McArdles. Cameron claimed that hundreds of thousands of Britons were cheating the government’s disability system. The Department for Work and Pensions begged to differ. It estimated that less than 1 percent of disability benefit funds went to people who were not genuinely disabled.

Still, Cameron proceeded to cut billions of pounds from welfare benefits including support for the disabled. To try to meet Cameron’s targets, the Department for Work and Pensions hired Atos, a private French “systems integration” firm. Atos billed the government £400 million to carry out medical evaluations of people receiving disability benefits.

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Kinsey's column sort of cheerfully mocks, in the Kinsleyan fashion, the dark warnings of "anti-austerians" like Krugman. He cheerfully quotes a series of statistics showing how miserable the recent economic crisis has been for Americans, and people around the world, and says, yes, recessions lead to death and austerity worsens recessions but it's worth it because "Austerians believe, sincerely, that their path is the quicker one to prosperity in the longer run." And Kinsley seems to accept that belief as true.

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Revolutions tend to occur in waves, triggered by the aftermath of wars, like the world wars, or by revolutions in leading countries, like the French Revolution and the revolutions of 1848. In the last generation, there have been four regional waves of revolution. With the end of the Cold War, communist regimes were swept from power from Eastern Europe to Central Asia, surviving only in a few countries including China, North Korea and Cuba. Unable to justify themselves with the pretense of fighting communism, military dictatorships were swept away in Latin America. Then the Arab Spring triggered a wave of populist if not necessarily democratic revolutions against autocracies in North Africa and the Middle East.

Are we seeing a new wave of revolutionary politics in the heartland of the industrial West? Although governments are not being violently overthrown in Europe, political systems are being destabilized by the rise of anti-system movements opposed to the major establishment parties. In Greece, the leftist Syriza party and the far-right Golden Dawn have sapped power from the political center. The most recent Italian election was dominated by anti-system candidates, including Silvio Berlusconi and the comedian Beppe Grillo.

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A phrase often heard is “moral hazard,” a concept borrowed by economists from the insurance industry. In its original usage, the term referred to the risk that insuring against an adverse event would invite the event. For example, someone who insured a house for more than its worth would have an incentive to burn it down. Nowadays, economists use the term to mean any unintended reward for bad behavior. Presumably, if we give debt relief to struggling homeowners or beleaguered nations, we invite more profligacy in the future. Hence, belts need to be tightened not just to improve fiscal balance but as punishment for past misdeeds and inducement for better self-discipline in the future.

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The report, from the liberal Institute for Policy Studies, finds that between 2009 and 2011, top executives at the 90 publicly held corporate members of the Fix the Debt coalition raked in at least $953 million -- and as much as $1.6 billion -- through the “performance pay” loophole, which counts some executive compensation as a tax-deductible business expense, instead of a salary. Fix the Debt, founded by Alan  Simpson and Erskine Bowles, is one of the many groups tied to Wall Streeter cum policy entrepreneur Pete Peterson, who has spent the last 20 years trying to reduce the debt, in large part through cuts to programs like Social Security and Medicare. The group has attracted some of the largest corporations in the country as sponsors, as well as former lawmakers, giving it serious clout in Washington.

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Simpson and Bowles have been speaking to the people, and the people agree with them!

No matter our audience, those we spoke with shared two things: a thirst for the truth about what it will take to right our fiscal ship and a willingness to be part of the solution so long as everyone is in it together.

Basically these two are nostalgic for December when it seemed like a "grand bargain" might actually happen:

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First, you’ve got the Reinhart/Rogoff (R&R) dustup which is generating lots of ink in the AMs papers—more on that in a moment.  Second, indicators once again show that the ongoing expansion in American economy continues to underperform, with weak readings on jobs, retail sales, and inflation.

The connective tissue here is contractionary fiscal policy.  And while no one or two individuals gets the blame for that, R&R’s work, with its arbitrary threshold (remember, they’re the ones purveying the debt/GDP-above-90%-slows-growth thesis), non-contextualized broad averages across countries, and data errors, is a  good example of how economists have misled the debate.

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But! Whoops, turns out they were wrong, about that one central fact that has been repeated as the gospel truth by purveyors of Tough Talk on debt the world over for the last three years. They screwed up their spreadsheet. Turns out average GDP growth in countries with debt-GDP ratios 90 percent and higher is positive, not negative.

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How did we get into this situation?

The trail leads through federal-state interactions, like so much of American history. States were largely independent of the federal government until the 1960s. The federal government began at that time to provide resources for states to expand their activities in healthcare and then other activities as well. These grants have risen from well under $1 billion a year to around $500 billion in recent years. States rely on these funds to give grants to cities and for helping with many other expenses.

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In a statement from NETWORK, the Sister Simone Campbell-led social justice organization denounced Rep. Paul Ryan's (R-Wis.) budget as creating "untenable situations for those struggling to survive" through cuts to Medicaid and the social safety net.

In a multi-state, grassroots effort against austerity cuts, a coalition of faith leaders have organized events around the country on Wednesday, including delivering loaves and fishes to members of the House of Representatives (a reference the Biblical story of having enough during a time of scarcity).

They've also released an animated message about "finding the political courage to pass a moral budget."

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At the rank-and-file voter level, this is, of course, a cartoon version of ideologies; many self-described liberals are hardly dreaming of turning America into a giant kibbutz while many self-described conservatives just want the government out of their face. However, at the elected official level in Washington, the conservative cartoon in particular is no comedic caricature: As Rep. Paul Ryan's new House Republican budget shows, it is an actual worldview, with specific legislative proposals in tow.

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ROME, Italy — Rome is awash in political posters.

They're plastered on buses, billboards, even the Segways that bear footsore tourists through ancient cobbled streets, with messages from a seemingly baffling array of 25 parties and coalitions — from the Workers' Communist Party to the neo-Fascist Tricolor Flame — competing in parliamentary elections on Sunday and Monday.

Although actually a relatively simple contest, the elections could have a profound impact on the future of Italy and the entire euro zone.

The results will determine whether Italy maintains its policies of fiscal restraint and economic liberalization that have restored its credibility on financial markets over the past year, or if voter anger with austerity will usher in a government that would spend its way out of recession at the risk of clashing with Italy's euro zone partners, especially Germany.

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But for a president himself, the State of the Union provides a unique opportunity to focus the entire nation’s attention on the central issue you want the nation to help you take action on.

President Obama has been focusing his (and therefore America’s) attention on immigration, guns, and the environment. All are important. But in my view none of these should be the central theme of his address Tuesday evening.

His focus should be on the joblessness, falling real wages, economic insecurity, and widening inequality that continue to dog the nation. These are the overriding concerns of most Americans. All will grow worse if the deficit hawks, austerity mavens, trickle-down charlatans, and government-haters who have commanded center stage for too long continue to get their way.

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The report found that even many Americans who would consider themselves middle class, with household incomes of $55,465-$90,000, qualify as “liquid asset poor,” with less than three months' savings for basic expenses. One-quarter (26 percent) of households were found by CFED to be  “net worth asset poor,” meaning that the few assets they do have are overwhelmed by their debts.

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The Office for National Statistics said Friday that there was no growth in the nation's big services industry while output of production industries fell by 1.8 percent, including a 1.5 percent drop in manufacturing.

Britain emerged from a nine-month recession in the third quarter, when GDP grew by 0.9 percent. But if the economy shrinks again in the first quarter of 2013, it will be officially back in a technical recession, defined as two consecutive quarters of economic contraction.

"Today's numbers have greatly increased the risk of a new recession and a downgrading of the U.K.'s AAA credit rating," said Chris Williamson, chief economist at financial data company Markit.

All three of the big rating agencies — Moody's, Standard & Poor's and Fitch — have placed Britain's rating on negative watch.

The latest figure was worse than the market consensus of a contraction of 0.1 percent, and came just two days after the chief economist of the International Monetary Fund said it was time for the government to reassess its focus on spending cuts.

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“Forecasters significantly underestimated the increase in unemployment and the decline in domestic demand associated with fiscal consolidation,” Blanchard and co-author Daniel Leigh, a fund economist, wrote in a paper on growth forecast errors. The authors essentially admit that they failed to consider important factors about how regions might react to austerity in times of financial crisis when they advised IMF austerity policy.

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December’s payrolls were up 155,000 and the unemployment rate held steady at 7.8 percent.  Factories and construction sites added jobs — 25,000 and 30,000, respectively — an improvement over recent months.  On the other hand, the public sector shed another 13,000 jobs, driven exclusively by local governments, the continuation of a longer-term negative trend as localities struggle with budget constraints.

Hourly wages and average weekly hours got a bit of a bump up as well, so weekly earnings are up 2.4 percent over the past year.  Since inflation recently has been tracking at around 2 percent, that’s a slight gain in real pay (important, because starting this month, most workers will take a 2 percent hit to their paychecks due to the expiration of the payroll tax break, a casualty of the fiscal cliff deal).  There was also some evidence of more folks moving from part-time into full-time jobs.

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And yet the pit exists.  It goes by the name of “austerity.” However, it didn’t just appear in time for the last election season or the lame-duck session of Congress to follow.  It was dug more than a generation ago, and has been getting wider and deeper ever since.  Millions of people have long made it their home.  “Debtpocalypse” is merely the latest installment in a tragic, 40-year-old story of the dispossession of American working people.

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