Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

...on whether things are improving in the six months or so before the vote. Cameron and company imposed austerity for a couple of years, then paused... the economy picked up... [and so gave] them a chance to make the same mistakes all over again. They’ll probably seize that chance. And... there’s a good chance that the resumption of austerity will usher in another era of stagnation.... There’s a somewhat similar problem in the euro area, as Barry Eichengreen noted.... The policies that pulled Europe back from the brink were made politically possible by fear... of collapse... [and] deflation. But as the fear abates, so does pressure.... My pessimism here could be all wrong.... But my guess is that we’re looking at an era of stop-go austerity, in which politicians who refuse to learn the right lessons from history doom their citizens to repeat it.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/05/08/stop-go-austerity-and-self-defeating-recoveries/