The coronavirus is a once-in-a-lifetime historical crisis, but even under the most unprecedented of lockdown measures, scrolling through the news still produces an occasional shiver of déjà vu. On Monday, George Osborne, the former U.K. chancellor of the Exchequer, made headlines when he suggested his government compensate for pandemic spending by enacting new austerity measures. Since the 2008 recession, when fiscal policies slashed funding worldwide for the very public services that have now been pressed into service in the battle against Covid-19, austerity has become a dirty word. Even the International Monetary Fund has made its due apologies to Greece for prescribing a near-fatal dose of rack and ruin to its fragile economy. Nevertheless, here we find ourselves, hearing the same old bad ideas that ravaged the Eurozone invoked as a solution to our present disaster. Now that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has called for a moratorium on further stimulus legislation, we won’t need to wait around to see austerity rhetoric at work here at home.

It is tempting to regard Osborne’s ideas as retrograde—the pronouncement of just another swamp creature, emerging from the muck of post-2008 neoliberalism, to claim some sliver of political relevance. Yet Osborne is hardly an outmoded public figure (he’s editor of the Evening Standard), and other policymakers have similarly glommed onto the notion of austerity as the best economic recourse for post-lockdown governments. Even as nations around the world spend and borrow in order to keep their citizens alive and their health care systems afloat, austerity politics looks poised for a resurgence. In fact, as some note, the coronavirus pandemic allows these blinkered policies to slip into the discourse couched in the language of public safety.

In Germany—a country that has taken on debt for the first time since 2013 and where a balanced budget is something of a fetish—the economic minister is already promising a return to austerity “once the crisis is over.” Dealings over the European Union’s relief package, too, have been marred by fiscal moralism and a refusal to look beyond 2008-era playbooks. Facing a “tsunami of bankruptcies,” EU policymakers have decided that each country must shoulder its debt on its own. Such a program means grave financial risk for the zone’s struggling southern states—Italy, for example, entered the pandemic over-leveraged and is now essentially bankrupt—and likely involves austerity measures for those nations in the months to come.

The EU negotiations could have gone another way. Nine of the group’s member countries had initially floated proposals for a “coronabond,” a mechanism that would have allowed the Eurozone to bear its debt collectively, each state in solidarity with the other. This prospect was championed even by commentators who have critiqued debt mutualization in the past. Eurozone power brokers, nevertheless, duly shut it down. Solidarity, after all, is anathema to austerity. Rather than try to envision a more equitable and secure future for the region, Dutch minister Wopke Hoekstra reportedly called Brussels to investigate why some Eurozone countries didn’t have the economic surplus necessary for sticking out the pandemic.

To penny-pinch while thousands die and millions experience unemployment is, as Portuguese Prime Minister António Costa said, “senseless” and “repugnant.” The squabbling and slow pace of relief had a real human cost, while making the EU look more divided than ever. And former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis—who would know—is betting that it has only resulted in another “iron cage of austerity.” If fiscal policymakers were unable to privilege human life over their bottom line in 2008, why start now?