This is what austerity looks like:
Zoom into the country level and you can see this even more clearly. Here is unemployment in Spain, Italy, France, Greece, Portugal, and Ireland. As you can see, it’s skyrocketing:
And here are the structural budget deficits for the same set of countries. As you can see, they’re falling:
All the numbers in this post, by the way, come from the International Monetary Fund’s latest data (pdf). Values for 2012 and 2013 are the Fund’s estimates.
