Spain officially plunged into its second recession in three years Monday, just days after the United Kingdom suffered the same fate. The driver of economic slowdowns across the European continent is austerity, the rapid reduction in debt and deficits that fails to address joblessness and leads to economic contraction.

Though the U.S. is experiencing slow but steady economic growth, austere economic policies are jeopardizing the future of the American economy as well. Half of the nation’s recent college graduates are either jobless or underemployed, according to data from Drexel University and the Economic Policy Institute. Republicans seized on the report as proof of President Obama’s failure, but youth employment numbers will only get worse under the GOP’s policies of austerity. That’s because austere government policies hit young workers the hardest, according to a new report from the International Labour Organization, as CNBC reports:

Youth unemployment has been singled out for particular concern in developed economies which critics argue governments have been slow to deal with. [Author of the report Raymond] Torres said the effects of austerity were particularly skewed against youth.

“It’s impossible to see massive declines in youth unemployment unless the economy itself starts to recover, because the youth are disproportionately affected by the stagnation and the recession. There are good practices that show that those countries which combine youth study with work experience do better,” he said.

As Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman notes, Europe provides ample proof of austerity’s failures for young workers. In Ireland, nearly a third of young workers are unemployed. In Spain, the unemployment rate for workers under age 25 tops 50 percent. Across America, public sector budget cuts have hit younger workers hardest. The effects are damning — young workers who enter a depressed workforce spend the rest of their lives making up the lost wages, affecting economic growth for decades.

Conservatives in the United States and Europe have pursued deficit and debt reduction policies with reckless abandon since the end of the Great Recession under the assumption that they would spark investor confidence and inspire growth. The opposite has been true. Austerity is failing across Europe, particularly for the young workers economies will depend on in the future. And yet, Republicans continue to push the same policies right here at home.

Tea Party-backed candidates swept into Washington in 2010 on a wave of opposition to bank bailouts. Now that they’re in Washington, however, their campaigns are drowning in campaign cash provided by the very banks that benefited from the Troubled Asset Relief Program.

The 10 freshmen Republicans on the House Financial Services Committee who have Tea Party backing have taken more than $100,000 from the political action committees affiliated with JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, and Goldman Sachs — the nation’s five largest banks — Bloomberg reports:

Yet the anti-bailout fervor that drove the messaging of Republican candidates during the campaign cycle of 2009 and 2010 has dissipated, and those same lawmakers are now collecting money from the firms bailed out by President George W. Bush’s $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program. [...]

The political action committees of those institutions have distributed $169,499 through March 31 to the campaign coffers of the 10 freshman Tea Party-backed lawmakers on the House Financial Services Committee, according to an analysis of campaign finance disclosure records.

The Tea Party hasn’t succeeded in ending “too big too fail” because they haven’t tried. Though the five biggest banks are now bigger than they were before the financial crisis, the Tea Party members haven’t proposed a single piece of legislation to limit their size. Instead, they’ve focused on repealing financial reform and blocking efforts to protect consumers from Wall Street’s predatory practices.

Multiple Democrats have proposed legislation to cap the size of large banks, while others have proposed new ways to unwind large banks without taxpayer-funded bailouts should they collapse. The efforts have drawn no support from the Tea Party. “No more bailouts,” Tea Party Express’ website proclaims. The candidates it and other Tea Party organizations backed in 2010, however, apparently no longer feel the same way.

Organizers and protesters around the world will come together to commemorate International Workers Day tomorrow, and they are taking on familiar targets. Large protest actions are planned in more than 115 American cities, where activists will continue the anti-Wall Street message started by the 99 Percent Movement last fall. The action will again center in New York, where protesters have identified 99 targets in Manhattan, including large Wall Street banks like JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, and Bank of America.

Wall Street banks are pooling resources and coordinating with each other to plan for the New York City protests and will work with local law enforcement to monitor the protests throughout the day. Though the New York-based banks offered no specifics on how they plan to deal with the protests, one security adviser made the laughable comparison that Wall Street banks — the same ones whose errors include triggering the financial crisis and wrongfully foreclosing on thousands of Americans — were innocent elk defending themselves against attacking wolves, Bloomberg reports:

Banks cooperating on surveillance are like elk fending off wolves in Yellowstone National Park, he said. While other animals try in vain to sprint away alone, elk survive attacks by forming a ring together, he said. [...]

Spokesmen for Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Bank of America, Citigroup Inc. (C), Morgan Stanley (MS), UBS AG (UBSN) and Credit Suisse Group AG (CSGN) wouldn’t describe security measures for the protests. One likened commenting to telling al-Qaeda about the bank’s continuity plans.

That Wall Street banks view themselves as innocent victims of wolf-like predators in the form of protesters is ironic, given that multiple Wall Street insiders have blown the whistle about the financial industry’s predatory practices. In November, a former JPMorgan insider said that exploiting consumers was “the purpose of the banking organization,” a claim seemingly echoed by a Goldman Sachs trader who decried the bank’s “toxic and destructive” culture in which clients were sometimes referred to as “muppets.” Remember, it was Goldman that sold self-described “shitty deals” to its own customers. Other banks have perpetuated fraudulent foreclosure and credit card practices, profited off of student loans, and charged huge fees on customers who were collecting unemployment benefits.

It’s no secret why the banks view the 99 Percent Movement so negatively — the movement took Wall Street’s excesses and abuses to the mainstream, refocusing the national discussion on rising income inequality, exploding student debt, and fraudulent banking practices. That effort will continue tomorrow, when protesters will march through Manhattan and picket various Wall Street banks. They’ll be joined by actions in San Francisco, where protesters will specifically target Wells Fargo, as well as in other cities around the country. More events will take place around the world, in cities like London, Sydney, Toronto, and Barcelona.

For months, Mitt Romney has been dogged by a 2008 New York Times op-ed he wrote entitled “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt.” But now, the same adviser who claimed Romney’s extreme views wouldn’t matter in the general election because it will be “almost like an Etch a Sketch” is doing some serious Etch a Sketch-shaking of his own.

Romney strongly opposed the “bailout” of General Motors, writing: “If General Motors, Ford and Chrysler get the bailout that their chief executives asked for yesterday, you can kiss the American automotive industry goodbye. It won’t go overnight, but its demise will be virtually guaranteed.” He doubled down on that in February, saying that his “managed bankruptcy” proposals would have been vastly superior to the Obama administration’s “crony capitalism plan.” Now that the federal intervention by the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations has proven a huge success, the Romney campaign is trying desperately to change its tune.

On Saturday, Romney’s senior adviser Eric Fehrnstrom said:

[Romney's] position on the bailout was exactly what President Obama followed. I know it infuriates them to hear that… The only economic success that President Obama has had is because he followed Mitt Romney’s advice. … The fact that the auto companies today are profitable is because they’ve shed costs. The reason they shed those costs and have got their employee labor contracts less expensive is because they went through that managed bankruptcy process. It is exactly what Mitt Romney told them to do.

Fehrnstrom has made the same claim before. “Mitt Romney had the idea first,” he said last May. “Mitt Romney argued that instead of a bailout, we should let the car companies go through a restructuring under the bankruptcy laws.” This, of course, flatly contradicts Romney’s February editorial, in which he wrote of Obama’s efforts: “I believe that without his intervention things there would be better.”

As industry experts have noted, however, exactly following Romney’s plan would have led to the collapse of the auto industry, since the private sector wasn’t willing to lend GM and Chrysler the money they needed to get to managed bankruptcy. “There was no one that was willing to come up not only with the cash to keep them afloat but also to serve the warranties of everyone, you and I that drive all these cars,” Rep. Fred Upton (R-MI), a Romney endorser, said in February. “There was no one that could have picked up those pieces other than the federal government.”

Sales of iPhones, iPads, and iPods have made Apple the world’s most profitable technology company — its stock price is hovering around $600 a share, and it is now larger than the rest of the American retail market by itself. Apple often boasts about the number of jobs it has created in the United States; according to its own estimates, the company is responsible for a half-million American jobs.

What Apple hasn’t told Americans, though, is that an intricate financial set up utilizing low-tax states in the U.S. and offshore tax havens has allowed it to skirt billions of dollars in American taxes over the last decade. By setting up financial offices in states like Nevada — which has no income tax — and routing other profits through Ireland, Luxembourg, and nations in the Caribbean, Apple avoided an estimated $2.4 billion in American taxes in 2011 alone, the New York Times reports:

Apple’s headquarters are in Cupertino, Calif. By putting an office in Reno, just 200 miles away, to collect and invest the company’s profits, Apple sidesteps state income taxes on some of those gains.

California’s corporate tax rate is 8.84 percent. Nevada’s? Zero. [...]

Apple was a pioneer of an accounting technique known as the “Double Irish With a Dutch Sandwich,” which reduces taxes by routing profits through Irish subsidiaries and the Netherlands and then to the Caribbean. [...]

Without such tactics, Apple’s federal tax bill in the United States most likely would have been $2.4 billion higher last year, according to a recent study by a former Treasury Department economist, Martin A. Sullivan.

Apple’s American tax rate was 9.8 percent in 2011, according to Sullivan. Its global tax rate, however, was just 3.2 percent and has been in the single digits for the last decade. Its profits are skyrocketing. The amount it pays in taxes, however, has barely budged:

While dodging American taxes, Apple has lobbied both state and federal governments for large tax breaks. The California state legislature has passed four tax breaks aimed at tech companies since the mid-1990s — the most recent, which Apple lobbied for itself, will cost the already-crunched state government $1.5 billion a year. The company is part of a coalition called Win America that has lobbied Congress to temporarily lower the tax rate on overseas profits that are returned to the United States — even as it admits to routing profits overseas to avoid American taxes in the first place.

Corporations like Apple have argued for lower corporate tax rates in the United States, insisting that the current 35 percent tax rate is hurting growth. But while that is the highest marginal rate in the world, companies rarely pay it. The U.S. is actually near the bottom in corporate tax revenues collected; in 2009, only Iceland collected a smaller share of its GDP in taxes. That has an adverse effect on all taxpayers, who foot the bill for the $60 billion lost to corporate tax dodging each year. In 2009, offshore tax havens cost the average individual taxpayer $434; in 2010, making up the lost revenue would have required an extra $2,116 from each American small business.

Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman hit back against the GOP’s claim that American businesses pay the highest corporate taxes in the world during an appearance on ABC’s This Week Sunday morning, lashing out at Mitt Romney’s California campaign co-chair and former Hewlett Packard CEO Carly Fiorina.

Fiorina — who unsuccessfully challenged Sen. Barbara Boxer’s (D-CA) senate seat in 2010 — insisted that “we now have the single highest business tax rate in the world” and claimed that companies are moving jobs overseas to avoid this burden. Krugman snapped back against her assertion, noting, “nothing you said about business taxes is actually true”:

FIORINA: We now have the single highest business tax rate in the world. Guess what, with the highest tax rate in the world, we see the same thing around the world as we see in states. States with lower tax rates have more jobs, more people. People leave states with higher tax rates. The data is crystal clear.

KRUGMAN: Nothing you said about business taxes is actually true. …. If you look at the actual tax collections in the United States on business, they’re lower than other advanced countries. And if you look at the alleged finding that high business taxes cause job loses in states, it goes away. Kick the tires even slightly and the whole thing falls apart. It’s just not true.

Watch it:

Indeed, a recent study from the Center for Tax Justice (CTJ) found that “the U.S. is already one of the least taxed countries for corporations in the developed world.” As a share of GDP, the U.S. had the second lowest tax rate, behind only Iceland. In 2009, U.S. corporate taxes had fallen to only 1.3 percent of GDP, from 4 percent in 1965.

The Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts concluded that “the worst fears of the policy debates over raising additional revenue from high-income households to sustain spending on public services are unlikely to materialize.” Millionaires will attempt to avoid higher taxes by changing the composition of their incomes, but don’t, in fact, move to avoid the higher fees.

Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney campaigned with Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R), who presides over one of the least job-creating states in America, today at Otterbein College — a school that benefited from the passage of the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, commonly known as the stimulus.

Otterbein received a grant worth more than $80,000 for a federal work-study program in July 2009. Ignoring that fact, though, Romney proceeded to attack the stimulus in his speech to students:

ROMNEY: Then there was the stimulus itself. $787 billion of borrowing. It could have been entirely focused on getting getting the private sector to buy capital equipment, for instance. That puts people to work. Or to hire people. Instead, it primary protected people in the governmental sector, which is probably the sector that should have been shrinking.

Watch it:

Romney also mixed up the facts about the stimulus. In calling the stimulus a hand out for government programs (which he said “probably should have been shrinking”), Romney ignores that the last three years were the worst on record for government job losses. In calling the stimulus a failure, he ignores its obvious successes: It saved or created millions of jobs, turned around economic growth, and pulled the American economy away from the precipice of collapse.

The American economy grew more slowly than expected in the first quarter of 2012, expanding at a rate of 2.2 percent. While the numbers are another illustration that the economic recovery is still on the right track (particularly compared to European countries that have fallen back into recession), they fell short of estimates.

One bright spot of the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis report, however, is that the American auto industry is continuing its resurgence and adding to economic growth:

Motor vehicle output added 1.12 percentage points to the first-quarter change in real GDP after adding 0.47 percentage point to the fourth-quarter change.

That the auto industry helped boost economic growth is yet another sign that letting the industry fail — as many Republicans, including presumptive GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney, wanted to do — would have had disastrous effects on the American economy.

The auto industry rescue, according to some estimates, saved more than one million jobs. Since it was saved, the industry is growing again — its biggest companies are adding jobs, boosting sales, and posting record profits. As today’s report shows, that’s having a sizable impact on America’s economic growth, and it’s translating into job growth as well: in March, nearly 10 percent of the 120,000 jobs added to the economy came from growth in the auto and parts manufacturing sector.

With the nation’s unemployment rate still above eight percent, millions of Americans are looking for work, and the country’s biggest corporations are hiring. According to a new report from the Wall Street Journal, however, many of those corporations are adding jobs overseas at a faster pace than they are at home. Even worse, others are cutting their domestic workforces while adding jobs in other countries at a rapid pace:

Those companies, which include Wal-Mart Stores Inc., WMT +2.70% International Paper Co., Honeywell International Inc. and United Parcel Service Inc., boosted their employment at home by 3.1%, or 113,000 jobs, between 2009 and 2011, the same rate of increase as the nation’s other employers. But they also added more than 333,000 jobs in their far-flung—and faster-growing— foreign operations.

The companies included in the analysis were the largest of those that disclose their U.S. and non-U.S. employment in annual securities filings. All of them have at least 50,000 employees. Collectively, they employed roughly 6.4 million workers world-wide last year, up 7.7% from two years earlier. Over the same period, the total number of U.S. jobs increased 3.1%, according to the Labor Department.

Many of the companies are adding jobs in the U.S. but adding even more overseas — reversing a trend from a decade ago in which they were outsourcing American jobs to other countries. But some companies, like Wal-Mart, have boosted overseas employment while maintaining flat job growth in the U.S., and others, like UPS, have slashed jobs at home even while adding them in other countries:

A similar Wall Street Journal report last April found that America’s largest multinational corporations outsourced more than 2.4 million jobs over the last decade, even as they cut their overall workforces by 2.9 million.

President Obama has proposed a tax credit to encourage businesses to bring jobs from overseas back to the United States in order to relieve high unemployment and boost economic growth. Republicans and corporations, meanwhile, have blamed outsourcing on high taxes, even though corporations pay less in America than they would in most of the developed world.

The Georgia Dome is a world-class sporting facility that serves the National Football League’s Atlanta Falcons and often hosts the Southeastern Conference basketball tournament, the SEC football championship, an annual bowl game, and the NCAA Tournament. In 2013, it’s slated to host the NCAA Men’s Final Four — college basketball’s biggest event — and it’s been home to two NFL Super Bowls. Judging by the fact that major events keep coming back, the place is in fine shape.

In the eyes of its inhabitants, though, the Georgia Dome is old, crumbling, and wholly inadequate, and if the Falcons and the city of Atlanta get their way, the Dome won’t stand much longer — even though it’s only 20 years old. According to new plans announced by the city of Atlanta and the Falcons yesterday, the Dome will soon be replaced by a $950-million, state-of-the-art facility with a retractable roof. The Georgia Dome — built a measly two decades ago — will be imploded, and taxpayers will be footing at least part of the bill, as the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports:

The new plan comes with a higher price. A GWCC-commissioned study released Wednesday put the cost of a new retractable-roof stadium at $947.7 million, up from the $700 million estimated last year for an open-air stadium. Under either plan the public-sector contribution would be an estimated $300 million from an extension of the hotel-motel occupancy tax, passed by the Georgia Legislature in 2010, according to Frank Poe, executive director of the GWCC Authority, the state agency that operates the Dome.

The hotel-motel occupancy tax was originally passed to help finance the construction of the Georgia Dome. It was supposed to expire in 2010, but when the owners of the Falcons threatened to pursue a new stadium in the Atlanta suburbs, the Georgia legislature rushed to extend it so as to keep the team downtown. The extension included an agreement that the Falcons could pursue a new stadium on the same site. Less than two years later, they’re doing exactly that.

The recession and a sluggish economic recovery, meanwhile, crunched Georgia’s state budget and forced deep cuts into areas like education. The state owes local school districts more than $5 billion collectively — Atlanta-area school districts are millions of dollars short. In 2011, the state cut $403 million from its education budget after taking cuts of $300 million and $275 million in the previous two years.

The Falcons want a new stadium because they feel they’re missing out on the riches that come with new skyboxes and luxury suites — amenities the Georgia Dome lacks compared to newer NFL facilities. Still, the team’s value has increased nearly $300 million since owner Arthur Blank bought it in 2002. If the Falcons want a new stadium, they should build one. They just shouldn’t come to taxpayers asking for help.