RE: The UK’s Spending Dilemma – Is Austerity the Only Answer?

As the government becomes a larger percentage of the economy, it starts to represent a larger portion of economic growth. Before too long, the only meaningful way to grow the economy is to grow government spending. It starts to extract more and more wealth from an increasingly smaller percentage of the economy. Increasing wages and productivity matters less and less as anything earned increasingly gets siphoned off to the government.

Austerity might be a bad option. But increasingly taking from the economy is far worse in the long term.