Austerity Has Lost Its Meaning -- The Editor's Blog, The Washington Free Beacon

Austerity. The media keeps using that word. We do not think it means what they think it means. If it means anything. In America today austerity means whatever liberals want it to mean.

Last week the Washington Post reported that President Obama’s budget request for 2015 “will call for an end to the era of austerity that has dogged much of his presidency.” Instead, the Post gleefully explained, the president will focus on “pumping new cash into [programs supported by liberals],” while abandoning his symbolic nod toward reforming the entitlement programs that threaten to bankrupt the country.

In other news, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel on Monday announced the Obama administration’s plans to slash the Army to its smallest size since 1940, a famously good year in geopolitical history. The move is perfectly in keeping with the administration’s sophisticated foreign policy strategy of thinking about what George W. Bush would do, and then doing the opposite of that. According to the New York Times, the proposal “takes into account the fiscal reality of government austerity.”

We’re confused.

But we’re not surprised. The media has had a tenuous grasp of “austerity” for years. First they bemoaned the “austerity” imposed by European countries in the wake of the great recession—typically in the form of major tax increases coupled with moderate spending reductions. These tax-heavy austerity regimens failed, the Thought Leaders declared in 2012, as voters in Greece and France replaced their current leaders with socialist alternatives.

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