Well, a rather simple view at things, although he's right that austerity, especially for the US, is not necessarily the right approach. Austerity for Greece makes sense because people need to feel confident that Greece, or a smaller nation like them, can meet their obligations somewhere in the future. They need to know that Greece will be stable. Austerity works to allow smaller states to show that they are resilent and stable and worth the risk for investment. Obviously, plenty of people are still investing or parking their money in the US, and right now, we're going to remain the benchmark and the absolute safest place to park money in terms of foreign investment.
Where the blogger is wrong (well, one of the places - if he really thinks injecting $34B, or whatever sum he said, would put a dent in anything in terms of a government stimulus then he needs to stop writing and do something else) is that he's missing the part where we haven't really tried anything specifically Keynesian or other theory, and we certainly haven't tried austerity (again, not that we should). Because really, we haven't. One of the biggest issues we've had is that we've had a cloud hanging over our heads in terms of near future planning in that we've known that taxes and the cost of doing anything were and are going to be going up, in some cases significantly, in the very near future. I don't recall Keynes saying we should increase government spending and, in the same near term, increase taxes or overall costs. And I'm not even a Keynes proponent. We probably did Keynesinism no help by only adopting the plan of spending a truckload and then at the same time, especially at the Federal level, say that we're going to put the screws on everyone tax and cost-wise soon after it. We pretty much hoped that people and businesses would just be so happy that with one hand we were spending a fortune in stimulus that they wouldn't notice the axe swinging down at us with the other hand. Unfortunately, people saw this coming. So everyone's taxes went back up this year, we have whatever Obamacare is going to cost us still coming down the road this year and the next few years, we have the baseline for government spending still way above historical trends with no expectation that it's ever coming back down, and we have large entitlement programs that no one is venturing to say what we'll do about them when they swallow up goverment spending.
Luckily, we are still the leader in the world in terms of economy and safety of investment so we're doing better than most, and we'll likley continue to plod along at a relatively flat pace for the foreseeable future. But we're not any closer to a breakout improvement in terms of the economy than we were a year or two ago. Steady as she goes, even if it's barely forward.
But no, we haven't really tried austerity, like the author seems to think we have. Nor do I think we should. But who knows, at least that's a better option than our current hybrid idea of Keynesian on one side (govt spend) and austerity on the other (increased taxes and costs). But hey, what better way to prove it out than to use the US economy as a little economics lab. Whoo-hoo!
Fucking A! 
