I thought this was just common sense

This is even debatable?!?!?! This isn't simply considered obvious common sense?

Perversely, austerity has become the cure du jour.

*snip*

For two decades, employers increasingly used outsourcing and off-shoring to cut their labor costs. That trend accelerated after the financial collapse. Many economists wonder whether permanent payroll jobs will ever return to their former level if present trends continue.

*snip*

But the austerity cure slows growth, raises joblessness, and makes debt-reduction more painful. It’s better to restore high rates of growth and employment. Then, after recovery comes, we can balance the budget at a higher level of economic output.

In the late 1930s, Franklin Delano Roosevelt tackled joblessness with his public works programs. These were palliative, but the permanent cure was a massive economic recovery — as byproduct of World War II. When the war came, we damned the torpedoes and the deficit worries, and spent whatever it took to defeat the Nazis and the imperial Japanese.

Debt increased massively, but economic growth shot up to 12 percent a year for the four war years, and unemployment disappeared. The war also brought huge investments in manufacturing technology. That twin stimulus powered a 25-year postwar boom, and the war debt was easily paid down. [emphases added]

This, to me, is just common received wisdom. Of course it's "perverse" to seek economic health through austerity. How did that ever get to be even remotely controversial?!?!? Sorry, but I never did and never will see the "wisdom" in austerity.