Austerity has failed in Europe, where the European Union just racked up 18 months of negative growth with no end in sight. It is failing in the United States, where this year’s deficit reductions will cut the growth rate in half.

But austerity is succeeding as politics. The German government shows no signs of taking its heavy foot off Europe’s oxygen hose, and President Obama seems determined to strike a 10-year deal with the Republicans that would equal 10 years of sequesters and then some.

What might change this grim politics?

Last seek, Senator Elizabeth Warren — how splendid to be able write the words Senator and Warren in the same sentence — showed the way. Warren introduced her very first free-standing bill, and fittingly it was a bill to cut interest rates on student loans.

Warren’s bill is only a start. It would prevent an increase in Stafford Loans, federally subsidized loans to low and middle-income families, which are slated to double in cost on July 1 from 3.4 percent interest to 6.8 percent. Warren’s bill would cut the rate to the Federal Reserve lending rate to banks, currently 0.75 percent.

But there is in Warren’s proposal the germ of a counter-revolution against austerity politics.

Budget-balance mania is favored by elites. Regular people don’t want cuts in Social Security and Medicare. The Peter G. Peterson Foundation has spent close to a trillion dollars creating one front group after another, trying to sell the proposition that we can somehow deflate our way to economic recovery. Peterson has few takers — except among the group of people who count, beginning with President Obama.

The austerity crusade seems impervious to both logic and evidence. It will give way only when there is a popular counter-movement of real power.

It seems to me that a mass movement for relief of college debt could be such a movement. Some 37 million students and former students have college loans, totaling more than a trillion dollars. And tens of millions of parents who were required to co-sign loans for their kids are at risk of students fall behind on their payments.

That’s a lot of people — college-educated people in their prime of life. Politicians need to hear from them. An entire generation is failing to get economic traction in a weak job market. College debt only adds to the delay young adults face in buying homes or starting families. This is not an abstract ideological proposition. It is up close and personal.

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