Since the onset of the financial crisis, European countries have attempted to deal with their economic malaise by implementing austerity packages, slashing government spending and laying off public workers. However, such measures have proved self-defeating, as the austerity measures blunted economic growth and caused Europe’s debt to actually grow:

The eurozone failed to reduce its government debt in the third quarter of last year, as meager growth offset efforts by several of the bloc’s 17 nations to improve their finances by cutting spending and raising taxes, according to official data released Wednesday.

The countries’ total government debt relative to their annual economic output was barely changed at 90 percent of gross domestic product in the third quarter of 2012 compared with 89.9 percent for three months earlier, the EU’s statistics office Eurostat reported. It was up from 86.8 percent of GDP a year earlier.

Austerity has also, among other things, pushed Eurozone unemployment to a record high and threatened Great Britain with a triple-dip recession. Both the International Monetary Fund and the International Labor Organization have warned against further fiscal consolidation, saying that it would quash economic growth even more, thereby doing nothing to reduce debt loads. The National Institute for Economic and Social Research found that European debt loads will be higher, not lower, because of austerity.

But European officials show no signs of slowing down, as the top EU economic official recently doubled down on austerity. “Any lapse into complacency would be unforgivable. We need to stay the reform course to revitalise the European economy,” he said.

Union membership plummeted in 2012 to the lowest level since the Depression, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The membership rate dropped to 11.3 percent from 11.8 percent, while total membership fell by roughly 400,000 workers, largely due to massive layoffs of teachers, firefighters, and other public employees.

Anti-labor measures passed by Republican-controlled governments in historic union strongholds have also played a part in dwindling membership:

Losses in the public sector are hitting unions particularly hard since that has been one of the few areas where membership was growing over the past two decades. About 51 percent of union members work in government, where until recently, there had been little resistance to union organizing. That began to change when Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker signed a law in 2011 eliminating most union rights for government workers. The state lost about 46,000 union members last year, mostly in the public sector.
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In Indiana, where a new right-to-work law took effect last March, the state lost about 56,000 union members. The law prohibits unions from requiring workers to pay union fees, even if they benefit from a collective bargaining agreement. Michigan lawmakers approved a similar measure in December.

Union membership has been on the decline since the 1980s, with drastic consequences for middle-class Americans. As unions shed members, middle-class incomes have shrunk and income inequality has soared.

While weakened unions are not the sole cause of these trends, employers have gained an outsized advantage in the labor market. Some companies have threatened to do away with benefits if employees even ask about forming a union. Meanwhile, Republican lawmakers continue to strip workers’ protections, despite the fact that anti-union laws tend to be deeply unpopular with the public.

After months of threatening to again take the economy hostage in a move they had admitted could cause a global financial disaster, House Republicans today approved a three-month increase in the federal debt ceiling that will allowed Treasury to avoid defaulting on the nation’s debts. The increase, which lasts until May 19, passed the House 285-144.

Democrats largely opposed the measure before the vote, and Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) called it a “gimmick unworthy of the challenges we face.” 111 Democrats and 33 Republicans voted against passage.

The legislation, which also requires both houses of Congress to pass a budget resolution, will now go to the Senate, where it is also expected to pass. The White House has said it would not oppose the three-month increase even as it sought a long-term solution.

At a Wall Street Journal breakfast, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI), who is re-emerging into the public eye following his failed bid for Vice President, adopted the Republican line that December’s deal to avert the so-called fiscal cliff is the final word on taxes going forward. Ryan falsely claimed that Democrats received revenue, while Republicans have “yet to get anything,” meaning that the next budget deal should only include spending cuts:

“They already got their revenues,” Ryan said. “So what, we’ll roll over and they get more revenues? That’s not how it works. In the spirit of bipartisan compromise, they’ve gotten revenue increases already. We’ve yet to get anything as a result of it. It used to be 3-1. Isn’t that what Erskine says? $3 of spending cuts to every dollar of tax increase. The president in his own budget last year claimed 2.5 to 1. We’d argue with whether they actually achieved that, but where’s the 3? Where’s the two-and-a-half? Where’s the $1.8 trillion in cuts?”

If the $600 billion in revenue adopted in the fiscal cliff deal counts, then the $1.5 trillion in spending cuts passed by Congress during the last session do also. Adding in reduced interest payments on the debt, spending cuts have outnumbered revenues by nearly 3-1, exactly the ratio Ryan describes:

Here, in fact, is Ryan bragging about the cuts included in the Budget Control Act adopted in 2011. “We’re actually cutting spending while we do this,” he said. “We’re getting two-thirds of the cuts we wanted in our budget.”

Ryan is reportedly planning to bring a budget to the floor that will balance in 10 years, with no new revenue. His last budget, which voucherized Medicare and decimated Medicaid, didn’t balance for nearly 30 years.

Tech companies are some of the most notorious tax dodgers, as their business is easily shifted from place to place and their revenues easily hidden in tax havens. Case in point, Yahoo has funneled hundreds of millions of dollars into low-tax countries, saving it tens of millions of dollars in taxes, as Bloomberg News reported:

Yahoo has taken advantage of the law to quietly funnel hundreds of millions of dollars in global profits to island subsidiaries, cutting its worldwide tax bill. [...]

Yahoo’s offshore operations cut its taxes by $42.8 million in 2011, U.S. securities filings show. Last February, the company reported a dispute with the U.S. Internal Revenue Service regarding its overseas arrangements. It didn’t disclose the amount at stake.

Kimberly Clausing, an economics professor at Reed College, estimates that “Profit shifting into tax havens by corporations costs the U.S. $90 billion a year.” That cost then gets shifted onto other businesses and individuals in the form of higher taxes or decreased government services.

Across the globe, corporate tax rates have plummeted in recent years, which one major bank admits “lend[s] and argument to those calling for hikes“:

The Wall Street Journal reported today that much of the money that U.S. corporations claim is offshore, and thus exempt from taxation, is actually right here in America. As the Wall Street Journal put it, this fact “undermines a central argument made by companies seeking tax relief to bring home money they have earned abroad.”

Democrats were unsuccessful in their push for a financial transactions tax after the 2008 financial crisis, but after 11 Eurozone countries received approval to institute such a tax Tuesday, two lawmakers are planning to try again. Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-OR) and Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) will reintroduce their proposal, which would raise an estimated $352 billion over the next decade by instituting a 0.03 percent tax on financial trades.

A financial transactions tax would slow down high-frequency trading, which has exploded in the last five years. Such trading “has absolutely no social value,” according to one of its pioneers, and only increases volatility in the market. The tax would have little effect on normal traders.

Critics of the Euro-wide turn to a transactions tax say it could slow down growth and encourage businesses to move elsewhere, and similar claims have been made about the American version. But 52 financial executives endorsed the tax last year, and DeFazio told ThinkProgress last year that such claims are false.

“For 50 years we had a tax that was about seven times larger than this when the country was seeing the greatest growth in its history, post-World War II,” he said. “So we’ve proven this will not have a detrimental impact on growth. In fact, it perhaps is beneficial to growth. It’s not necessarily beneficial to salaries of hedge fund managers on Wall Street.”