As ThinkProgress has explained, the U.S. has rebounded from the 2008 financial crisis quicker than Europe, in part because it embraced stimulus measures, while several Eurozone countries have implemented (or been pushed into) austerity. One of those countries is the UK, where growth has essentially flat-lined.

According to new data from economists Moritz Schularick and Alan Taylor, the U.S. has done better than should have been expected, considering the nature of the Great Recession. The same can’t be said for the UK:

The pink range indicates the expected recovery path. As we noted in our original column, the US exceeds expectations here. The US growth path manages to emerge from and stay above the predicted range by years 3-4-5 (i.e. 2010–12). In contrast, the UK path is disappointing, and can’t really be called a recovery yet.

Even using the maximal measure of excess credit based on bank and shadow bank data to bias the forecast path down as far possible, it is still not possible to account for the UK’s dismal performance. The UK was on a similar path to the US in years 1-2 (2008–09), but falls well behind the US in years 3-4 (2010–2011), only to drop below the forecast range in year 5 (2012).

As the U.S. was at least attempting to stimulate the economy — despite the protestations of Congressional Republicans — the UK adopted the Tories’ austerity package. Now it seems that only the Olympics are providing any bright spots for the UK economy.

The Republican Party’s insistence on protecting tax cuts for the wealthy as their end-of-year expiration approaches is a practice in “faith-based economics” that ignores statistics about job growth over the last decade, Kentucky Rep. John Yarmuth (D) said Tuesday.

The high-income tax rates expire at the end of the year, part of the so-called “fiscal cliff.” In an interview with ThinkProgress, Yarmuth blasted the GOP claim that letting the high-income cuts expire amounted to a tax hike on “job creators”:

YARMUTH: That’s nonsense, to be quite honest. All you have to do is look at the Bush years when those tax rates were in play and you had one of the worst eras of job creation in modern history. So, that was the whole purpose of cutting those rates back down. But it didn’t create jobs, and there’s really not any evidence that it ever does.

The vast majority of people who are actually hiring and firing, making those decisions, they make those decisions based on whether there’s enough business to justify hiring another person.

It’s a silly argument that’s based on some kind of faith-based economic system that really doesn’t exist in the real world.

Republican supply-side policies (once referred to as “voodoo economics” by then-presidential candidate George H.W. Bush) have indeed failed to generate the job and economic growth the GOP promised. The Bush tax cuts were followed by the worst growth in job creation in more than six decades, as they blew a massive hole in the federal budget. Both jobs and the economy as a whole grew faster under the higher Clinton-era tax rates.

Recent studies have shown that the expiration of the high-end Bush tax cuts would have little or no effect on economic growth, and even some Republicans have admitted that the cuts failed to spur growth at the rates the GOP had promised. Still, the party insists on the preservation of the lower tax rates for the wealthy and has even blocked an extension of the middle-income rates because Democrats refused to extend the high-income cuts too.

The Financial Times’ Shahien Nasiripour reported that the Obama administration is telling housing advocates that it will remove Edward DeMarco, acting director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, if Obama wins a second term:

If Mr Obama wins re-election, Mr DeMarco’s days may be numbered, with senior White House officials quietly telling housing industry activists in recent weeks that he will be replaced. [...]

He temporarily was named acting director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency in August 2009 by Barack Obama, US president, after the previous director left for the private sector.

He is still there three years later, despite clashes with the White House and the Treasury department over various administration proposals to aid the housing market.

The FHFA is responsible for regulating government backed mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. As acting director, DeMarco has prevented Fannie and Freddie from reducing mortgage principal for troubled homeowners, even though studies have shown that principal reduction is the most effective policy for keeping families in their homes and will save taxpayers money in the long run. DeMarco has also absurdly claimed that reducing principal to avoid foreclosure would be too much of a boon to big banks for the government to consider.

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner responded to DeMarco’s call on principal reduction by saying, “I do not believe [the FHFA's decision] is the best decision for the country.” According to the Financial Times, the administration is considering recess-appointing DeMarco’s replacement, as Senate Republicans seem intent on blocking any nominee who ever even considered principal reduction as a viable strategy.

According to Good Jobs First, an organization that promotes accountability in economic development, several states allow corporations to literally pocket their employees’ tax payments. Rather than having those taxes go towards public services, the companies withhold money from their workers’ paychecks and just keep it, never remitting it to the state, under the guise of a job creation program.

Good Jobs First found that “nearly $700 million is getting diverted each year. And it is very unlikely that the affected workers are aware, given that no state requires that the diversion be disclosed on pay stubs.” Now, Pennsylvania is considering becoming the latest state to participate, as the Philadelphia City Paper reported:

Republican Governor Tom Corbett is deciding whether or not to sign legislation that would require some workers to pay taxes to their bosses. Yes, you read that right. The bill, which would allow companies that hire at least 250 new workers in the state to keep 95-percent of the workers’ withheld income tax, is an effort to to recruit Oracle to the state.

Your taxes would get withheld by your boss like normal, but they would then keep them and spend it on private jets or monogrammed bathroom fixtures or whatever instead of turning them over to the state–turning your tax dollars over to the state being the whole reason they were ostensibly “withheld” in the first place.

“These deals typify corporate socialism, in which business gains are privatized and costs socialized,” wrote Reuters David Cay Johnson. “Leaders in both parties embrace these giveaways because they draw campaign donations from corporate interests and votes from people who do not understand that they are subsidizing huge companies.” The Pennsylvania Budget and Policy Center listed a host of reasons that Gov. Tom Corbett (R-PA) should reject the law, including its effect on state revenue and its loopholes that will allow companies to collect their workers’ tax payments even if they create no new jobs.

On graduation day, men and women walk across the stage as equals to get their college diplomas. But one year later, a new study shows, female graduates can expect to be earning less — about 82 cents on the dollar — than their male peers. The old problem of a pay gap is already prevalent in the newest generation to enter the workforce.

According to the report by the American Association of University Women, female graduates have a lower rate of full time employment, hold far more administrative jobs, and make up a smaller percentage of the industries that pay the most.

But female graduates also earn less even when they have the same major and same jobs, particularly those who majored in engineering, computer science, business, and the social sciences:

This study points to discrimination in hiring and pay practices, where women are expected to do the same job for less. This reaffirms a recent study that compared the hiring tendencies of science labs on college campuses, which found men were hired and paid more even with identical resumes to female candidates. It also blows a hole in the argument that women are paid less because they take time off to have children, since most female graduates entering the workforce aren’t immediately dropping back out of it.

Closing the pay gap could have a huge impact — and not just for women. The Huffington Post reports that making pay equal by gender would create a stimulus with the potential to grow the US economy by 3 to 4 percent. That’s more than double what the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act did, and that stimulus hugely helped the US recovery.

Vice Presidential candidate Paul Ryan will deliver a speech on poverty and economic mobility in Ohio today. According to the campaign, Ryan plans to argue that “Mitt Romney offers a better pathway for low-income Americans to improve their lives through opportunity and upward mobility.”

“We are here in partnership on behalf of an idea — that no matter who your parents are, no matter where you come from, you should have the opportunity in America to rise, to escape from poverty, and to achieve whatever your God-given talents and hard work enable you to achieve,” Ryan will say, according to speech excerpts. “Upward mobility is the central promise of life in America.”

However, Ryan’s policy prescriptions don’t match his rhetoric. Here are the key facts to know about Ryan, his budget, and how it would treat the least fortunate Americans:

1) RYAN AND ROMNEY’S SUPPLY SIDE POLICIES DON’T REDUCE POVERTY: Romney’s and Ryan’s economic prescription — which an spokesperson described as the Bush program, “just updated” — has failed to pull people out of poverty when its been tried in the past. During the Bush administration, 8.3 million people fell into poverty and child poverty rose by 3 percent. President Clinton’s policies, meanwhile, lifted 8 million people out of poverty. This chart compares the two administrations.

2) THE RYAN BUDGET INCREASES INCOME INEQUALITY: The budget Ryan authored makes a “priority of rewarding wealth over work,” which would increase income inequality. This chart shows that as a country grows more economically unequal, it becomes more likely that a parent’s income will act as a predictor for his or her child’s income.

3) 62 PERCENT OF RYAN’S CUTS COME FROM LOW-INCOME PROGRAMS: According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Ryan’s budget “would get at least 62 percent of its $5.3 trillion in nondefense budget cuts over ten years (relative to a continuation of current policies) from programs that serve people of limited means.”

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