Virtually every headline about the Puerto Rican government’s newly released fiscal plan has focused on its finding that the island won’t be able to pay back the vast majority of funds owed to its creditors, many of them American-based hedge and mutual funds. Even in the new plan’s rosy projections for economic growth, the island would only be able to return a small fraction of its at least $74 billion in municipal debt in the next 30 years.

But informing those growth projections is an economic doctrine that has gotten it wrong in nation after nation. The borderline religious belief in austerity holds that cutting government spending is the route to growth for struggling economies, but it generally has the opposite effect in real life.

In Puerto Rico, the approach involves a series of punishingly deep cuts to the island’s public sphere, including shuttering over two-thirds of Puerto Rican governmental bodies, closing more than 300 public schools, and putting huge swaths of the island’s public infrastructure up for sale.

“The record is unambiguous that austerity does not lead to economic growth. It leads to contraction,” Nobel Prize winner and former chief World Bank economist Joseph Stiglitz told The Intercept when asked about the plan. “What is deeply disturbing is that when you have cuts to things like health care, education, and infrastructure, that’s inevitably going to have implications for long-term economic growth.” He and 25 other economists recently released their own fiscal plan for Puerto Rico as the new official one was being drafted.

Slower growth would mean even less ability for the government to pay back its creditors.

The government plan, released last Wednesday, is intended to replace the plan approved by the Washington-appointed fiscal control board last March and respond to the damage caused by hurricanes Irma and Maria. It, too, will have to be approved by the control board, known colloquially as the “junta” on the island. Created by the PROMESA law, which was passed by Congress in the summer of 2015, that body has broad authority over economic life in Puerto Rico and is tasked with interfacing between its government and creditors.

The fiscal control board will analyze the new fiscal plan over the next several weeks and will either approve the plan, reject it, or send it back to the governor’s office for revisions. Sources close to the matter suggest a final plan could be approved as soon as March.

“Puerto Rico is a colony, but it was a colony that we said could be self-governing. Now we’ve taken away that self-governing aspect,” Stiglitz told me. “For a country like the U.S. that makes a big claim to believing in democracy, it’s pretty terrible for it to say, ‘You’re a democracy, but — by the way — the hedge funds are just as important as you are, so you may have to lose your votes.’”

As an alternative to austerity, he and the other economists call for a write-down of “most if not all” of the island’s debt and large-scale public investment, as a means of recovery from both last year’s brutal hurricane season and the over-a-decadelong recession the island had been grappling with well before the storms hit. Stiglitz emphasized that spending — expansionary fiscal policy — is especially important as Puerto Rico doesn’t have a means of changing its monetary policy, which is the same as that set for the mainland U.S. “Austerity will actually lead them to a weaker economy, what we’ve seen over and over again is that countries [where austerity is enacted] become more financially precarious,” he said, likening Puerto Rico’s situation to that of Greece, another indebted economy without a sovereign currency.

“Fiscal policy’s what you need to jumpstart the economy. Puerto Rico is in an even worse situation because one of the other peculiar features there is extreme migration to the U.S. When jobs get scarce, people leave. That makes demand even weaker, and the economy even weaker. It’s a vicious cycle,” Stiglitz noted. Estimates vary for how many have already left post-Maria, though the fiscal plan predicts a nearly 20 percent population dropoff by 2022.

“Just look around places in the U.S. where there was population exodus,” he said. “You can’t sustain public facilities or the public framework that’s necessary for a prosperous economy.”

Sitglitz and other economists argued that the government’s previous fiscal plan “did not provide for economic recovery” and adopted a number of “unrealistic assumptions,” including “an over-optimistic view of how structural reforms, such as pension and other spending cuts, or downsizing the government labor force might stimulate growth, when the most likely effect is the opposite.”

The next plan, they added, “must be fundamentally different than the previous one if Puerto Rico is to have a chance for recovery.”

It isn’t. Aside from even more bullish projections for economic growth, the government’s new draft is similar in spirit to the previous one and considerably longer — 92 pages compared to just 37 in the last version. It includes far more detailed proposals for sector-by-sector cuts and how to integrate more private sector involvement in the island’s essential services. To the chagrin of bondholders, neither the economists’ plan or the one put forward by Gov. Ricardo Rosselló’s office predict that the island will have any capacity to service its debt over the short-term; the latter suggests it won’t be until 2048 when the island could handle paying off — at most — $15 billion.

“The largest difference between this fiscal plan and our sketch is that the government and the Fiscal Control Board continue to bet on austerity and other neoliberal policies that have not worked in Puerto Rico or in most of the countries,” says José Caraballo Cueto, a University of Puerto Rico economist who signed and helped draft the alternate proposal.

Compared to the previous version, the government’s new plan premises even minimal repayment on a projected spike in the island’s gross national product. Its authors predict the GNP will swell by 7.6 percent next year, compared to the 3.4 percent drop in GNP state analysts projected several months ago. The gap will be “fueled by federal support,” they argue, alongside structural reforms to roll back government spending and create a more welcoming environment for private investment.

Asked if such projections were realistic, Caraballo Cueto told me, “No. A real (adjusted by inflation) economic growth of 7.6% in 2019 is unrealistic.” He suggested, as well, that a bill introduced late last year by Sens. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. —for massive federal spending on the island and debt cancellation — might be among the most realistic options for jumpstarting Puerto Rico’s economy. “I think that if Congress takes seriously their shared responsibility and approves the project of Warren and Sanders that asks for more than $146 billion for Puerto Rico, we can expect a relatively high economic growth for two years,” he said. “But not as high as 7.6 percent, and that growth will not last forever, as reconstruction probably will only take between one or two years.”