People treat austerity as a choice, but really it's a consequence.

The west isn't the global colonizer it used to be, and so it can't just take all the materials from everywhere else and get rich on the backs of someone else, or levy a technological advantage so extreme it just crushes everyone else.

That's good for the soul of the society in the long run, and it's also helped lead to the largest quality of life improvement for the most people in the history of the world. However, it also means that western countries don't get to have the same quality of life as they did when they were taking advantage of everyone else. Austerity is inevitable when there just isn't as much material wealth to go around since nations must build wealth internally and in cooperation with the world rather than extracting wealth from conquered territories.

The only question becomes, "When?"

If you just keep taking out debt you never intend to pay back as western societies have done for the past 20 years, you're not austere today, but you will have to be austere tomorrow (or worse, your kids will because you'll be dead and they'll be paying for your largesse). It sucks, but you'll always have to eventually face austerity when reality is you're not going back to Pax Britannia.

So given that there will always be a time that austerity must be implemented to establish a sustainable government. If you become sustainable today it's going to hurt, but if you wait until tomorrow the not only will it hurt, it will hurt more because you'll also have to carry the burden of all the times you weren't sustainable as well.

Imagine for a second that you're a contract killer, and you make a lot of money doing that, and you have a very nice life for yourself. Your family lives in a mansion, eats the best food, gets the best schooling and medical care. Then one day you wake up and realize what you're doing is evil and you need to stop doing it. You get a nice, respectable job that of course makes much less money. The reality is you have 2 choices: You can pretend you're still a contract killer and go deeply into debt to maintain the quality of life for your family, or you can realize that you're respectable now and the consequence of that just decision was that your family isn't going to have the quality of life they once had. You can make moral arguments all you like that your family deserves the lifestyle you used to have, that your kids are going to be harmed, but unless you want to go back to your previous evil lifestyle (and let's be honest, that probably isn't possible anymore, and that's a good thing) you really just need to sell the mansion and find something in your price range, start shopping at tesco like everyone else, send away the top tier teachers and doctors and send the kids into the same schools and hospitals as everyone else. That's what actually needs to be done.