Austerity! (The Fiscal Cliff! Republicans!)

Krugman:  Ryan Avent reminds us just how poor economic performance has been since the crisis, all across the advanced world:

As John Quiggin has been emphasizing, this across-the-board poor performance puts the lie to claims that it’s all because of that scary Obama person; in fact, the US has done better than the rest, although still quite badly — this is indeed a race between the halt and the lame...

What accounts for the differences? The most obvious culprit is austerity, which has been much more marked in Europe and the UK than in the US. Here’s the IMF’s estimate of the cyclically-adjusted primary balance — what the budget balance excluding interest payments would be if the economy were operating at full employment. Europe and the UK have fully reversed any stimulus introduced during the crisis; America has not: