The public failure of “austerity” was made worse as Spain revealed that unemployment has risen to a record high 27.2 percent during the first quarter of this year.

6.2 Million people are now jobless in the Eurozone’s fourth largest economy. 

Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy plans to reveal a new reform plan on Friday.  He says it will not include more austerity measures. But few believe the government's plans will be ambitious enough to restart the ailing economy and create jobs.

Spain’s economy took a massive hit when the real estate boom driven by cheap credit crashed in 2009, leading to massive layoffs in the construction sector since then.  But the deep public spending cuts of “austerity” which were mandated by the EU in exchange for bank bailouts made everything worse. 

The research most cited by governments pushing austerity has come under fire for being riddled with errors.  The original research by influential American economists Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff sought to prove that cutting government debt spurs economic growth.

But the new research, by Thomas Herndon, Michael Ash, and Robert Pollin of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, set out to reconstruct the Reinhart-Rogoff results, and could not unless large amounts of crucial data were eliminated.

Another error seems to be a simple failure to use an Excel spreadsheet correctly, as highlighted by economist Mike Konczal at the Roosevelt Institute's Next New Deal blog.  In building a formula to calculate average economic growth rates, Reinhart and Rogoff appeared to leave off several lines of data in their spreadsheet.