According to the latest data from its government, Spain’s economy contracted for the fifth straight quarter during the three months ending in September. Despite this, Spain seems intent on doubling down on austerity measures, as Reuters reported:

Gross domestic product shrank for the fifth straight quarter between July and September, dropping 0.3 percent, while consumer prices rose by 3.5 percent year-on-year in October, the two sets of National Statistics Institute data showed.

Elected just under a year ago on an austerity ticket, [Prime Minister Mariano] Rajoy has signed off on a belt-tightening programme worth over 60 billion euros through to the end 2014 to cut the public deficit.

Spain, like most of the rest of Europe, has seen its growth stall as austerity measures have kicked in. Several European countries are facing recessions, or even depressions, due to misguided fiscal contraction amidst sky-high unemployment. And the countries that have done the most belt-tightening have seen the least growth.

U.S. conservatives continually claim that all the U.S. needs to do in order to boost its slow economic recovery is cut spending and reduce the nation’s debt. But Spain exemplifies how that approach can backfire. Not only has it been cutting spending since the financial crisis, but it ran budget surpluses before the crisis, having a lower public debt than Germany. Those surpluses didn’t protect it from its current catastrophe:

Now, Spain is facing 25 percent unemployment.

The U.S. is doing better than Europe because, among other factors, it didn’t go straight for austerity (and it has an independent central bank that could use stimulative monetary policy). However, the so-called “fiscal cliff” that is due to take effect at the end of the year would cause a more severe fiscal contraction than most of Europe has experienced.

Mitt Romney has touted his experience as a business leader as proof of his economic know-how, but his economic record as governor of Massachusetts doesn’t seem to back up his argument.

While Romney was in office from 2003 to 2007, Massachusetts lagged behind the rest of the nation in job growth and its economy grew roughly half as fast as the national average. It finished the four-year period 47th in job creation, and its economy never reached 2 percent annual growth, according to the National Bureau of Economic Analysis.

As this chart from the Center for American Progress’ Christian Weller and Sam Ungar shows, Massachusetts would have had to grow far faster to keep pace with the national average and even more quickly to keep up with the 4 percent annualized growth Romney now promises will occur under his economic plan:

Had Romney grown Massachusetts’ economy at the national average, the state’s economic output would have increased by 5 percent. Had he grown it as fast as he promises to grow the American economy, output would have been more than 10 percent higher, Weller and Ungar found.

Economist Robert Lynch, writing in the Baltimore Sun, found that if the American economy performed at the same growth rate as the Massachusetts economy under Romney, he would create just one-sixth of the 12 million jobs he has promised — a full 10 million short of his goal. Lynch also found that President Obama’s private sector job creation record is better than Romney’s was as governor: under Obama, the number of private sector jobs has grown 1.6 percent. It grew just 1.3 percent in Massachusetts during Romney’s term.

While the unemployment rate fell during Romney’s four years it office, it did so largely because of the shrinking of the state’s labor force. Only three states lost more people during Romney’s four years in office than Massachusetts, according to Lynch.

Romney often claims that he rebuilt the Massachusetts economy by making the state more business-friendly, and he promises to do the same as president by cutting tax rates for the wealthy and corporations. Weller and Ungar conclude, however, that the performance of the Massachusetts economy under Romney’s leadership “leaves little to brag about.”

Mitt Romney’s campaign has received a lot of negative attention for running utterly untrue television ads in Ohio that claim Chrysler is moving all of its Jeep production overseas. But that’s not stopping the candidate from making a made-for-radio version of the advertisement, repeating many of the same blatant falsehoods.

The highly dubious claims in the ad have been widely debunked. Even the CEO of Chrysler was forced to clarify any confusion wrought by the ads, writing in an email to employees, “Jeep production will not be moved from the United States to China… It is inaccurate to suggest anything different.” But Romney, whose campaign has had a penchant for disregarding the truth when it’s politically inconvenient, is running the ads anyway — even going so far as to suggest the auto rescue helped China:

Barack Obama says he saved the auto industry, but for who? Ohio, or China? Under President Obama, GM cut 15,000 American jobs, but they’re planning to double the number of cars built in China, which means 15,000 more jobs for China. And now comes word that Chrysler plans to start making Jeeps in — you guessed it — China. What happened to the promises made to auto workers in Toledo and throughout Ohio, the same hardworking men and women who were told Obama’s auto bailout would help them? Mitt Romney grew up in the auto industry… Mitt Romney: He’ll stand up for the auto industry. In Ohio, not China.

The three major auto companies — GM, Ford, and Chrysler — had significant increases in sales after the auto rescue, and it’s estimated that 1.3 million jobs were saved from the measure. Even prominent Republicans have contradicted Romney’s claims regarding the rescue.

The ad’s misleading claims have already had some negative consequences for Romney: A group of auto workers called their union heads in panic after hearing the claims, fearing that they’d been fired without knowing it.

At Naked Capitalism, Yves Smith notes that the anticipated lengthy shutdown of New York City’s subway in the wake of Hurricane Sandy is likely to hit low-income workers the hardest:

What is going to happen to these people for the week or more while the subway is put back into service? The five boroughs has income disparity as high as China. Many of these people are modestly paid hourly workers, and some will be hit hard by the loss of even a week of income. These are the people you might or might not notice, yet are critical to the functioning of the city: the janitors, the cooks and delivery men, the people who run newsstands and dry cleaners and cobblers and food carts, the people who do secretarial and clerical work in businesses large and small throughout the city.

This is true not just in New York City, but most places that mass transit has been affected by the storm. “The costs of owning and operating a vehicle are such that ten percent of American households in the nation’s largest metro areas do not have access to a private vehicle,” according to a report by the Brookings Institution. “Compared to their car-owning counterparts, zero-vehicle households are more likely to earn low incomes, live in cities, and take public transportation to work.”

And transportation closures also disproportionately affect minorities. As the research organization PolicyLink has found, “nineteen percent of African Americans and 13.7 percent of Latinos lack access to automobiles, compared with 4.6 percent of whites. Poverty complicates the problem: 33 percent of poor African Americans and 25 percent of poor Latinos lack automobile access, compared with 12.1 percent of poor whites.”

Lack of mass transit is increasingly preventing low-income workers from accessing jobs. Of course, there’s nothing to do about a hurricane wreaking havoc with the mass transit system, but it shows just how important those systems are to the least fortunate workers.

Mitt Romney’s misleading new advertisement is causing auto workers to fear they’re losing their jobs.

The ad falsely claims car company Chrysler is moving its Jeep production to China, when in fact the company is opening up additional production there, not shifting American jobs overseas. But some auto workers have been calling their union, worried that they’re about to be out of work:

Bruce Baumhower, the president of the United Auto Workers local that oversees the major Jeep plant here, said Mr. Romney’s initial comments on moving production to China drew a rash of calls from members concerned about their jobs. When he informed them Chrysler was, in fact, is expanding its Jeep operation here, he said in an interview, “The response has been, ‘That’s pretty pitiful.’ ”

The Romney campaign has repeatedly insisted that they are “not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers,” and this ad seems to be an example with consequences. It has been widely panned as a blatant falsehood thrown out in the final days before the election.

But the ad is clearly part of the candidate’s attempt — no matter the facts — to recover his reputation in the auto industry, which is still suffering after Romney published his now-infamous op-ed titled, “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt.”

As Mitt Romney struggles to gain ground with voters in Ohio, he has attempted to redefine his position on the federal auto rescue that saved as many as 1.3 million jobs. Romney released a highly misleading ad in Ohio this week that criticizes President Obama’s handling of the bailout and touts his own apparently unreleased plan to help the auto industry.

Romney’s actual plan was to oppose federal financing of the auto companies’ bankruptcy; instead, he wanted the private sector to finance the rescue while the government guaranteed post-bankruptcy loans. But private sector financing was “pure fantasy” at the time, according to industry insiders, because credit markets were “bone-dry” in the middle of the financial crisis.

Reporters and auto insiders aren’t alone in their criticism of Romney’s stance on the auto rescue, though. Here are six Romney supporters who have also contradicted his view of the auto bailout or criticized his plan:

1. Michigan Rep. Fred Upton: In February, Upton told Western Michigan University’s WMUK radio that only the government could have saved the auto industry. “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,” Upton said. “There was no one that could have picked up those pieces other than the federal government.” He also contradicted Romney’s claim that the rescue was a bailout of auto unions, saying it was “bi-partisan from the get-go.” Without the bailout, Upton said, Michigan “would have hit 40 percent unemployment rates.”

2. Michigan Rep. Thad McCotter: “There was no choice” but to use government funds to save the auto industry, McCotter told MSNBC in February. “So to my fellow Republicans I’ll simply remind them, if you were in Congress at the point in time or if you were President Bush, you could leave all $700 billion of taxpayers hard-earned money with the Wall Street people, or you could take some back to Main Street to keep America a balanced, vibrant economy,” McCotter said. “To me there was no choice.”

3. Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder: In November 2011, Snyder urged Republicans to stop second-guessing the auto rescue, even if they disagreed with how it was done, because it had delivered incredible results for Michigan and the auto industry. “I would have had some differences on how they did it, but I’m not going to second-guess it,” Snyder told the New York Times. “The more important thing is the results. And the auto industry is doing very well today.”

4. Auto Industry Task Force member Harry Wilson: Wilson, a member of Obama’s Auto Industry Task Force who has run for office as a Republican in New York, criticized Romney’s view of the bailout last week. “I’m, as you know, a Republican who supports the governor. But I think on this issue, I think he’s really mishandled it,” Wilson told Bloomberg. “He came out both in 2008 and earlier in 2012, in a piece in one of the Detroit newspapers, and said he wouldn’t have supported any government capital because private capital was available. That’s simply not true.”

5. The Detroit News editorial board: A self-described “conservative newspaper,” the Detroit News endorsed Romney for president last week. But in its endorsement editorial, the paper blasted Romney for his “wrong-headedness on the auto bailout.” Romney “was wrong in suggesting the automakers could have found operating capital in the private markets,” the editors wrote. “Romney suggested government-backed loans to keep the companies afloat post bankruptcy. But what GM and Chrysler needed were bridge loans to get them through the process, and the private credit markets were unwilling to provide them.”

6. Ex-Chrysler CEO Lee Iaccoca: Iaccoca has endorsed Romney, but he also has praised the auto bailout for its rescue of the industry. “Two years ago, it looked like Detroit and Michigan and the car business was in the toilet,” Iacocca told the Detroit News this month. But after the bailout, he said, “things have turned out pretty well.” And even if Iaccoca has criticisms of pieces of the bailout, the paper said he “praised the government actions over the past two years that gave two of Detroit’s Big Three automakers another chance.”