While America’s recovery from the 2008 recession has hardly been booming — economic growth remains sluggish and unemployment is still a discouragingly high 7.8 percent — it’s actually been better than Europe’s. “The economy of the European Union will shrink by 0.2 percent this year, according to the International Monetary Fund. It is smaller than it was five years ago, while the American economy is 2.9 percent bigger,” noted New York Times reporter Eduardo Porter. Even two of Europe’s most impressive economies, Germany and Austria, are predicted to grow at half the U.S. rate over the next two years.

More strikingly, for all the stereotypes of Europe as a liberal haven, the United States actually hewed closer to the activist, Keynesian responses advocated by the American left-wing than did European policy makers:

Germany’s insistence that indebted Mediterranean countries cut government spending deepened recessions in those nations. [...]

[The United States Federal Reserve was] far more aggressive than the European Central Bank, quicker to drop interest rates to zero and pump money into the economy, buying government debt and other bonds. Fiscal stimulus — an initial $800 billion package in 2009 followed by about $600 billion in payroll tax cuts and other efforts — was bigger and more sustained than in other advanced countries. Banks in the United States were forced to raise billions in new capital, which allowed them to cope with the turbulent financial markets better than their European peers. [...]

Today, most economists say they believe that these policies provided vital support to the economy. In its most recent World Economic Outlook, published this month, the I.M.F. acknowledged that the fiscal stimulus was probably much more effective at bolstering growth than it had previously allowed.

While the sample size of developed western countries is small, comparing the different stimulus packages as a share of the economy with how much economic growth followed produces a positive correlation.

Of course, the effects of the 2008 crash were not distributed evenly across the international stage, and a few countries have bounced back faster than the United States. But those nations tend to be outliers in terms of their banking system or their reliance on exports. The Times article cites recent work by economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, which attempts to disentangle economies that suffered a systemic financial crisis from ones that merely suffered a boderline crisis. Under that apples-to-apples comparison, America’s per capita GDP has done noticeably better.

Higher economic growth does not necessarily translate directly into higher job growth, and as Porter also observes, one area where the United States has generally underperformed Europe is employment. But that’s largely because Europe has stronger unions, more regulations making it harder to fire workers, and because several European countries subsidize wages or subsidize companies to encourage them to keep workers on — hardly approaches advocated by American critics of left-wing economic policy.

Generally speaking, while the United States’ policy response to the recession was a watered-down version of what left-wing economists and advocates preferred, it came closer to meeting that model than the European response — which hewed closer to the right-wing austerity model. And since then, the U.S. recovery has noticeably outperformed Europe’s.

Mitt Romney and his campaign have consistently refused to divulge the loopholes and deductions that Romney would supposedly eliminate in order to cover the cost of his massive tax cuts for the rich and corporations. One adviser even responded “energy independence” when asked for a specific tax loophole.

During Tuesday night’s debate, Romney continued his ducking and dodging. Instead of naming any deductions, he merely re-upped on a proposal to cap the total amount of deductions that taxpayers are allowed to use:

And so, in terms of bringing down deductions, one way of doing that would be say everybody gets — I’ll pick a number — $25,000 of deductions and credits, and you can decide which ones to use. Your home mortgage interest deduction, charity, child tax credit, and so forth, you can use those as part of filling that bucket, if you will, of deductions.

Romney has floated a few versions of this plan — in a previous statement he set the deduction cap at $17,000 — but it doesn’t make his tax plan add up. As the Tax Policy Center explained today:

Eliminating all itemized deductions would yield about $2 trillion of additional revenue over ten years if we cut all rates by 20 percent and eliminate the AMT. Capping deductions would generate less additional revenue, and the higher the cap, the smaller the gain. Limiting deductions to $17,000 would increase revenues by nearly $1.7 trillion over ten years. A $25,000 cap would yield roughly $1.3 trillion and a $50,000 cap would raise only about $760 billion. [...]

Suggesting limits on deductions was Governor Romney’s first public statement about how he might offset the revenue lost by cutting tax rates. Without more specifics, we can’t say how much revenue such limits would actually raise. But these new estimates suggest that Romney will need to do much more than capping itemized deductions to pay for the roughly $5 trillion in rate cuts and other tax benefits he has proposed.

The Tax Policy Center in August released what economists have called the “definitive” study of Romney’s tax plan, which showed that he can’t possibly cut all income tax rates by 20 percent, prevent a middle class tax increase, and not add to the deficit. Assuming he’s committed to the 20 percent reduction, he will have to either increase middle class taxes or increase the deficit. And capping deductions doesn’t change that inescapable fact.

Multinational corporations based in the United States shelter $1.5 trillion in profits in other countries, and because the U.S. doesn’t tax offshore profits, that money is not subject to the corporate income tax. Corporate profits kept offshore don’t face American taxation until they are repatriated — that is, brought back to the United States.

When companies repatriate money, they are supposed to pay the difference between the U.S. corporate tax rate and the rate they presumably paid to the country where the money was kept. But Congress has little knowledge of how, or whether, those overseas profits are taxed by other nations.

Some companies, however, disclose their overseas tax rates, and when Citizens for Tax Justice analyzed 47 such companies, it found that many pay a low tax rate that would force them to pay close to, if not all of, the 35 percent repatriation rate. The top 10 companies, CTJ found, would all pay at least a 32 percent upon repatriation, meaning they have paid very little in other countries:

The 47 companies CTJ analyzed would pay an average rate of 27 percent on the money they hold overseas if they had to face the corporate income tax. If the other 235 Fortune 500 companies that offshore profits paid the same average rate, it would result in $328 billion in revenue for the U.S. government. “Added to the $105 billion tax bill estimated by the 47 companies who did disclose, this means that taxing all the ‘permanently reinvested’ foreign income of the 285 companies could result in $433 billion in added corporate income tax revenue,” CTJ found.

President Obama has proposed implementing a minimum tax on overseas profits that would help recover much of the lost revenue. Such a tax would limit corporations’ ability to stash profits overseas, and combined with other corporate tax reforms he has proposed, it would raise between $200 billion and $300 billion.

Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus expressed frustration with the media’s efforts to ask Mitt Romney what tax deductions and loopholes he would close to pay for his 20 percent across-the-board tax cut, calling such questions “unbelievable.”

“Not only doesn’t [Obama] have a plan for foreign policy. Clearly, he is just totally empty when it comes to his plan for the future,” Priebus said during an appearance on Laura Ingraham’s radio show on Wednesday morning. “I just find it, it’s unbelievable that the press continues to ask these questions, ‘well, what particular deduction are we talking about?’ Well, what about a plan in general from this president? He’s got nothing.” Listen:

In reality, while Romney has yet to specify how he would finance a proposal that all reputable economists claim would either add to the deficit or increase taxes on middle class, Obama has laid out detailed economic policy priorities and advocated for a jobs bill that has been scored by the Congressional Budget Office.

Paul Ryan has previously refused to provide the details of the GOP ticket’s tax plan, claiming that “it would take me too long.” Prominent Romney surrogate Gov. Bob McDonnell (R-VA) called such questions “laughable.”

At Tuesday’s presidential debate, both candidates were confronted with a question about equal pay for women, who currently make 77 cents for every dollar earned by their male counterparts. President Obama touted his first bill signed into law, the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which gave women more flexibility to sue over pay inequity.

Romney avoided the question, instead choosing to talk about how he made an effort to hire women during his governorship (a claim later contested by Massachusetts women’s advocacy groups). Soon after the debate, however, senior Romney adviser Ed Gillespie told the Huffington Post that, while Romney would not repeal the Lilly Ledbetter Act, he “was opposed to it at the time” and would not have signed it.

This admission was the most definitive position on pay equity the campaign has released. Romney has long refused to disclose his stance on equal pay initiatives like the Lilly Ledbetter Act or the failed Paycheck Fairness Act, which sought to protect employees from wage discrimination based on gender or ethnicity. Lilly Ledbetter herself released a statement after the debate, saying, “If Romney was truly concerned about women in this economy, he’d take a stand against paycheck discrimination. Instead, he has remained silent and refused to speak out for equal pay for women and their families.”

Before the second debate, women started moving toward Romney, though they have generally favored Obama by wide margins.

Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit unexpectedly resigned yesterday. He was one of just three major bank CEOs who had led their firms through the 2008 financial crisis that was still at the helm.

Pandit left having made $260 million with Citi, including his annual compensation as CEO and the money he made when he sold his hedge fund to Citi in 2007. But to hear CNBC host Maria Bartiromo tell it, Pandit quit because he hadn’t made enough money and because he was getting “bashed and bashed again by the President, by the populists”:

Let’s face it, we have an individual here who sold his hedge fund to Citi for $800 million, taking the CEO role five years ago, and then during the financial crisis agreeing to work for $1. Getting bashed and bashed and bashed again by the President, by the populists, and he probably just said to himself, “look, I’m done. If they’re not going to pay me commiserate with what some of my colleagues in banking are making, I can’t work for a dollar anymore.”

CNBC’s Jim Cramer added later, “you know what, I think people in general, they welcome any change at the banks, including our President.” Watch it:

Pandit indeed worked for $1 following the financial crisis. But he was awarded $15 million last year, despite his company’s precipitous decline. Overall, he’s been paid hundreds of millions of dollars as his company lost 88 percent of its value.