Francois Hollande yesterday successfully ousted Nicolas Sarkozy from the French presidency, winning a run-off election between the two by a vote of 52-48 percent. The Center for American Progress’ Matt Browne noted that Hollande “is a pragmatic progressive who realizes that austerity alone hasn’t worked, and that what Europe needs is a realistic strategy for job creation and economic growth.”

Indeed, the French vote, alongside elections in Greece in which voters abandoned pro-austerity parties in droves in favor of extremists, was a stark reminder that voters have no patience with forced economic sacrifice that isn’t paired with efforts to boost growth and create jobs. And here are three charts showing that the austerity policies adopted by European nations have certainly not delivered. The first, from the Financial Times’ Martin Wolf, shows that austerity goes hand in hand with a contracting economy:

This chart shows that the U.S., which hasn’t embraced austerity, is doing better than both the Eurozone and the austerity happy United Kingdom:

And finally, the Washington Post’s Brad Plumer flags this chart showing that, according to the International Monetary Fund, “Income and employment don’t fully recover even five years after the austerity program is enacted”:

Of course, European leaders are not the only ones slow to learn the lessons that failed austerity is teaching. After all, despite seeing what has happened in Europe following severe budget cuts, American Republicans are still pushing the same medicine.

MOUNT PLEASANT, Wisconsin — Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) made a surprising policy assertion late last week, seemingly telling a Wisconsin town hall that he supports a key financial regulation pushed by President Obama and progressives in Congress.

“If you’re a bank and you want to operate like some non-bank entity like a hedge fund, then don’t be a bank,” Ryan told constituents on Friday. “Don’t let banks use their customers money to do anything other than traditional banking”:

RYAN: I think we should have the same rules apply to everybody else. We should make sure you can’t get too big where you’re going to become too big to fail and trigger a bailout, and if you take risky behavior then you go into bankruptcy and we open up the bankruptcy laws to allow them to go into bankruptcy. And more importantly if you’re a bank and you want to operate like some non-bank entity like a hedge fund, then don’t be a bank. Don’t let banks use their customers money to do anything other than traditional banking. Those to me are the key tenets of reform which we did not see happen.

Watch it:

A proposal doing almost exactly that — known as the Volcker Rule, after former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker — was part of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law and has been opposed by most Republicans in Congress. The Volcker Rule largely bans banks that are backed by taxpayers from engaging in risky proprietary trading, limiting such activity to hedge funds and institutions that are not federally insured. With the Volcker Rule in effect, banks would either give up the sort of trading that played a major role in the financial crisis or forfeit their access to the Federal Reserve’s emergency lending and the FDIC’s backing.

While Ryan talks like someone who wants to rein in Wall Street at town hall meetings, it isn’t always the game he plays in Washington. Ryan opposed Dodd-Frank, and his biggest backer is the financial industry, which has had so much success lobbying to water down the rule that not even Volcker himself is satisfied with it anymore.

House Republicans will today finalize their deficit reduction plans as required under the Budget Control Act, the deal reached last August to raise the nation’s debt ceiling. The deal required cuts to both domestic discretionary and military spending, but the GOP quickly reneged on that plan, choosing to cut more from programs for the poor to preserve the nation’s bloated defense budget.

Under the Republican plan, millions of Americans would lose access to services they depend on. Nearly two million would lose food assistance through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP); at least 750,000 would lose access to health insurance from cuts to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act; and 23 million would be affected by the repeal of the Social Services Block Grant, which helps fund child care and disability assistance to low-income Americans, among other programs.

As the following graphic shows, however, the GOP’s deficit reduction hysteria is little more than an effort to gut social programs while protecting massive tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans:

The number of Americans affected by the Republican cuts is actually higher than the graphic shows. While the GOP plan kicks 2 million people off of food assistance, all 47 million who receive SNAP payments will see reductions in benefits. The estimated number who will lose health insurance under the Republican plan is likely higher, and the number of Americans affected by the repeal of the Prevention and Public Health Fund is unknown. Cuts to financial regulatory agencies like the CFPB will also affect an untold number of Americans.

While Republicans push these cuts in the name of righting America’s balance sheet and staving off a debt crisis, their efforts are miniscule compared to their push to extend budget busting tax cuts for the rich. By promising last week that they will offer a full extension of the Bush tax cuts — at a 10-year cost of $2.4 trillion — without offsetting the cost, GOP leaders assured Americans that their deficit-reduction efforts will never be achieved.

GREENDALE, Wisconsin — Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) told students at a town hall Friday that he would not support preventing a hike in their student loan interest rates if it was paid for by closing corporate tax loopholes.

“Nope,” Ryan told Matt Kozlowski, a student at the University of Wisconsin, who had asked him if he’d support closing such loopholes to stave off an imminent rate hike:

STUDENT: My question for you would be, would you support closing corporate tax loopholes to pay for that as a revenue raiser?

RYAN: Nope. Well, I support closing tax loopholes for tax reform. [...] So that’s what we want to do with all those corporate loopholes is do that, and with the student loan bill let’s cut some spending because that’s more spending, let’s cut spending that is lower-priority spending to address this higher-priority need.

Watch a clip of Ryan’s remarks:

If Congress doesn’t act by July, student loan interest rates will double from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent, costing needy students as much as $1,000 per year in added interest payments.

Instead of closing corporate tax loopholes, Ryan suggested paying for the bill by cutting “lower-priority spending.” House Republicans have proposed cutting preventative health care funds that would provide hundreds of thousands of breast and cervical cancer screenings for women, and using that money to prevent the interest rate hike.

Student loan debt currently tops $1 trillion, outpacing both total credit card debt and auto loan debt. The cost of college has nearly sextupled over the past 25 years, growing far quicker than general consumer items, gasoline, and even health care.

The rub is that Ryan’s budget actually aims to close corporate tax loopholes, but does so to pay for tax breaks for wealthy individuals, not students struggling with loan debt.

A favorite conservative attack on President Obama is that his policies — and even his personality — amount to an assault on American businesses. “President Obama himself is the most anti-business president in my lifetime. With rhetoric not befitting a president he has attacked oil companies, banks, airplane users, Wall Street and anyone who makes money,” wrote Gary Shapiro, president and CEO of the Consumer Electronics Association.

However, according to the latest data, President Obama has been very good for America’s biggest businesses. Last year, in fact, the Fortune 500 made a record $824 billion, topping the previous record set before the Great Recession:

The Fortune 500 generated a total of $824.5 billion in earnings last year, up 16.4% over 2010. That beats the previous record of $785 billion, set in 2006 during a roaring economy. The 2011 profits are outsized based on two key historical metrics. They represent 7% of total sales, vs. an average of 5.14% over the 58-year history of the Fortune 500. Companies are also garnering exceptional returns on their capital. The 500 achieved a return-on-equity of 14.3%, far above the historical norm of 12%.

Of course, that return to pre-recession level earnings hasn’t translated into job or wage growth for America’s workers. In fact, inflation-adjusted wages fell last year. Big companies are also squeezing more productivity out of their workers, with annual revenue generated per worker increasing by more than $40,000 over the last five years. CEO pay, meanwhile, increased 15 percent last year.

This data also puts the lie to the Republican claim that corporate tax cuts will spur businesses to hire. If all it took were extra cash, businesses would be hiring like crazy. However, they are clearly not doing so — and the effective corporate tax rate is already at a forty year low.

Even as the unemployment rate has slowly ticked down in recent months as the economy has regained all of the jobs it lost since President Obama took office, long-term unemployment remains a persistent problem. More than 40 percent of the unemployed have been out of work for at least six months, and according to a new report from the Pew Fiscal Analysis Initiative, about 30 percent of the unemployed have been out of work for at least a year:

The challenge of long-term unemployment has persisted, even as the overall unemployment rate has continued to improve. According to Pew analysis of Current Population Survey (CPS) data from the BLS, the percentage of jobless workers who had been unemployed for a year or more reached a peak of 31.8 percent in the third quarter of 2011. Despite modest improvement in the first quarter of 2012, the rate of long-term unemployment among the jobless remained stubbornly high. In fact, it was more than triple the 9.5 percent rate that it was in the first quarter of 2008, the first quarter of the Great Recession.

Studies have shown that there are several negative effects linked to long-term unemployment, including loss of lifetime earnings and lower earnings for the children of workers who are out of work for so long. One study even found that the long-term unemployed gradually lose important skills, including their level of literacy. Long-term unemployment also decreases life expectancy.