The inconvenient truth is that both are true.  We are rapidly approaching any number of inevitable, unavoidable physical constraints that will affect all of us, even the very rich who still imagine themselves to be above all that.

At the same time, the current political buzzword austerity, which has nothing whatsoever to do with that physical reality, is, as a swedish kind of death says, nothing more than the latest marketing campaign in a class war that has been going on non-stop more or less forever.  

The very people who are actively campaigning in every developed or developing nation to gut and destroy every social program that offers any sort of aid or support to the less fortunate, are also actively spending more than those programs cost to aggressively market the last of the world's oil, the last of the worlds arable land, the last of nearly every other critically scarce resource on the planet.

We all bleed the same color.