Enhanced Austerity Techniques
Business, PoliticsMay 30, 2011Last year, socialism lost to austerity in the polls – that is, in Merriam-Webster’s Top Ten Words of the Year.
“Austerity clearly resonates with many people,” Merriam-Webster’s Editor at Large Peter Sokolowski observed, noting that it was the most-searched word of 2010 on their web site. This was no spontaneous grassroots effort for the public to brush up on long-forgotten SAT words to impress mom, but rather, austerity was dragged from its dusty, forgotten linguistic closet and into the limelight by the unrelenting conservative messaging machine(which, incidentally, revived socialism to McCarthy-esque stature).Austerity blanketed the corporate airwaves like a thick, intellectual-sounding fog, cloaking every major public discussion on our serious budget problems in a haze of severe-sounding vagaries, thus shielding pundits and politicians from detailing in any specific way what services or benefits the American public would lose.
The problem with austerity, however, is that it requires a trip to the