Dishonesty by the political left and right.

Lefties conflate or confuse two senses of the word “austerity”: 1, inadequate aggregate demand and 2, inadequate (at least in the eyes of lefties) public spending. That’s the equivalent of, and as dishonest as the right’s conflation of deficit reduction and public spending reductions.

Put another way, the left trumpets the virtues of increasing demand as cover for lefties’ attempts to raise public spending as a proportion of GDP. While the right trumpets the virtues of deficit reduction as cover for reducing public spending.

To be more accurate, the intelligentsia on both the left and right realise that trickery is involved. Meanwhile, the majority on both sides are fooled by the above “conflations”: that is, they don’t get the distinction between for example deficit reduction and public spending cuts.