The Catholic nuns who began the “Nuns on the Bus” tour across the United States to protest cuts contained in the House Republican budget ended that tour today, blasting the GOP budget as “immoral” across from the U.S. Capitol. With more than a hundred supporters waiting outside the United Methodist center near the Capitol, the nuns criticized Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), the author of the budget, for using Catholic social teaching to justify its cuts.

“Faced with long-term debt problems, they say we must immediately slash protections for the poor, even as they fight tooth and nail for trillions of dollars in tax cuts for the wealthy and explode the debt at the same time,” Sister Simone Campbell said. “And then they line the pockets of the wealthiest one percent in our nation. This is wrong. And they’re doing it under the guise of fiscal austerity.”

“I’m not going to stand here and say the Ryan budget is moral. It’s immoral!” Sister Diane Donoghue added. “That’s all there is to it. And we stand with our bishops when we say that. It is immoral.” Watch it:

The nuns visited 10 Congressional offices, including Ryan’s, in nine different states during the bus tour. At each stop, they said they heard stories from vulnerable people whose lives would change for the worse if the GOP budget became law.

The nuns received widespread support; 75 members of Congress recently thanked them for embarking on the tour. As ThinkProgress has noted, the Republican budget finds 62 percent of its spending cuts from programs that benefit the poor and would kick millions of Americans off of food stamps and other programs.

“The Ryan budget would slash food stamps, it would slash Medicaid, it would slash a lot of domestic programs that benefit low-income people, affordable housing programs that [the Dept. of Housing and Urban Development] does,” Sister Richelle Friedman said. “So this is just really critical.”

Though Ryan attempted to justify the budget with Catholic social teaching, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops circulated letters urging members of Congress to vote against it, calling its cuts to safety net programs “unjustified and wrong.” Other religious leaders also condemned it.

-Steven Perlberg contributed to this report.

Austere spending policies officially pushed the United Kingdom back into a recession in April, and thanks to British Prime Minister David Cameron’s insistence on continuing austerity, the UK is experiencing a slower, more sluggish recovery than the one that followed the Great Depression. This austerity has not spread to the 2012 London Olympic Games, which are now set to be the most over-budget games in nearly two decades, Bloomberg reports:

The London 2012 summer Olympics are on course to be the most over-budget games for 16 years after organizers failed to forecast demands for security and private investment, according to a study by the University of Oxford.

The sports-related expense of hosting in the British capital is likely to cost more than twice the original estimate, researchers from the university’s Said Business School said in a paper. That’s the most since the 1996 summer Olympics in Atlanta, when costs overran by 147 percent.

In 2007, the British government tripled its original budget for the games to £9.3 billion ($14.5 billion). The true cost for taxpayers could end up being nearly £12 billion, Sky Sports News found in January. According to that investigation, the total taxpayer cost of the games could burgeon to £24 billion ($37.5 billion), counting increased spending on security and infrastructure aimed largely at the Olympics.

The British have pitched the games, as governments always do, as a benefit to the local economy. “The £300m already spent on tickets also means the economy is guaranteed to grow by 0.1pc during London 2012, while surveys say overseas visitors will spend around £700m,” according to the Telegraph, and Visa Europe estimates the games will generate £804 million in short-term consumer spending and £5.33 billion ($8.3 billion) over the next four years.

Assorted studies of major sporting events have shown that these estimates, however, are almost never accurate. Much of the estimated spending would have likely occurred anyway, either by British citizens or tourists who normally visit the British Isles in the summer months. Visitors to Great Britain, for instance, spend roughly £18 billion a year, more than 25 times as much as they’re estimated to spend at the Olympics. Other sectors of the British economy, meanwhile, will suffer because consumers will stay away to avoid Olympic crowds. Greek officials actually estimated a 10 percent fall in tourist visits during the 2004 Athens Olympics.

Some of the spending induced by the Olympics, such as the money aimed at improving public transportation and other infrastructure projects, will indeed benefit the British economy. But in terms of the country’s overall health, using money spent on the Olympics on targeted stimulus to combat the recession and sluggish recovery would have been a much better investment.

Having lost the argument over the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act, Republicans are now seizing on the fact that the law was upheld under Congress’ taxing power to falsely claim that it is a “massive tax hike” on the middle class. And some Republicans have gone even further, claiming that the law is the “largest tax increase in history.” As Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) said today on CNN:

BLACKBURN: Uh, we said all along it was a tax. And as I was out over the weekend at farmer’s markets and at church and at the grocery store and visiting with constituents, so many people said, ‘You know, back in August ’09, we were all saying that this seemed to be a tax,’ and if it was a tax, then this was going to be the largest tax increase in history. Indeed it was, and is.

Watch it:

Actually, as a percentage of the economy (which is the proper way to measure the size of a tax increase), the taxes in Obamacare are smaller than those in several tax packages of the last half century, including President George H.W. Bush’s in 1990, President Bill Clinton’s in 1993, and President Ronald Reagan’s in 1982. And of course, Obamacare will actually cut taxes for millions of middle class families. The bulk of the Affordable Care Act’s tax increases are on upper-income Americans.

The Incidental Economist put together this chart showing the difference: