President Obama today called, once again, for Republicans in Congress to support a plan to void the so-called “sequester,” the automatic budget cuts scheduled for March that were set in motion by the 2011 debt ceiling deal. House Republicans responded by releasing a statement that called for eliminating job training and financial literacy programs and by mocking the very idea of government funded scientific studies.

But engaging in the sort of austerity included in the sequester is a terrible idea with the economy in its current fragile state. As Macroeconomic Advisers noted today (reiterating its previous analysis), the sequester will knock 0.6 percent off of economic growth this year, killing 700,000 jobs:

– Our baseline forecast, which shows GDP growth of 2.6% in 2013 and 3.3% in 2014, does not include the sequestration.

– The sequestration would reduce our forecast of growth during 2013 by 0.6 percentage point (to 2.0%) but then, assuming investors expect the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) to delay raising the federal funds rate, boost growth by 0.1 percentage point (to 3.4%) in 2014.

– By the end of 2014, the sequestration would cost roughly 700,000 jobs (including reductions in armed forces), pushing the civilian unemployment rate up ¼ percentage point, to 7.4%. The higher unemployment would linger for several years.

Here are the competing plans to void the sequester that have been proposed in Congress. The GOP has yet to introduce an official plan this time around, instead just pointing to legislation that it passed in the last Congress. Of all the plans, only the Congressional Progressive Caucus’ acknowledges that the country’s most pressing issue right now is not the deficit, but lingering, high unemployment.

The online retail giant Amazon benefits from a large loophole in the federal tax code. Because companies only have to collect sales tax in states where they have a physical presence, Amazon is able to avoid collecting the tax in many states, giving it a way to undermine traditional retailers. But a bipartisan group of 57 members of Congress is trying to change the law to close Amazon’s loophole:

Twenty senators and 37 members of the House from both parties signed on to the Marketplace Fairness Act of 2013 (MFA)—legislation that would allow states to collect taxes on what consumers buy over the Internet.

The measure would finally resolve a decades-old dispute over whether states can collect sales taxes on mail-order and online purchases. Currently, states are barred from requiring out-of-state sellers to collect sales taxes, unless the retailers have a physical presence (or nexus) in their jurisdiction. The MFA would allow states to require sellers to collect these levies no matter where the firms are located.

This loophole gives Amazon (and other online shops) a leg up on its competitors for no real reason. As Michael Mazerov wrote for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, there is “no excuse for exempting large companies like Amazon and Overstock that are perfectly capable of collecting tax everywhere — just as their brick and mortar competitors do.”

Applying an online sales tax fairly would also make the tax code slightly more progressive, as “many low-income families would love to shop online to avoid sales tax but can’t because they don’t own a computer or can’t afford high-speed Internet access.” Sales taxes are inherently regressive, and exempting online purchases makes them even more so, as those with the right technology get to skip the tax entirely.

States governed by both Democrats and Republicans have moved to address this issue, but it won’t be truly fixed until Congress takes action.

Missouri Republicans this month touched off the latest push for a so-called “right-to-work” law, introducing legislation similar to the union-busting laws signed by Republican governors in Indiana and Michigan last year. The right-to-work proposal, which prohibits unions from requiring workers to join, is just one of multiple bills targeting unions that are making their way through the GOP-controlled state legislature. Others would end Missouri’s prevailing wage law and prohibit unions from using dues for political purposes unless workers gave them permission to.

Right-to-work, the most pernicious of the proposals, faces an uphill battle even though the GOP holds veto-proof majorities in both the state House and state Senate. Still, Republicans have been emboldened by successful right-to-work efforts in Michigan and Indiana, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports:

“I’ve seen a momentum building around the country, and I don’t think it’s an issue that Missourians or our Legislature can simply ignore or avoid,” said House Speaker Tim Jones, Republican from Eureka who has signed on as a co-sponsor of right-to-work legislation here. “It may be a multiyear process because this is the first time — in a long time — these issues have been debated with this much attention.”

The state senate will not prioritize passage of right-to-work, according to Majority Leader Ron Richard (R), because a similar proposal failed last year. But Republicans in both Indiana and Michigan said they would not prioritize right-to-work before passing it shortly after.

Instead, Richard said the Senate would focus on legislation that repeals the state’s prevailing wage law, which guarantees workers a livable wage, and another proposal that would keep unions from using dues for political purposes.

ProgressMissouri found that the various right-to-work proposals closely mirror legislation produced by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a business front-group that was abandoned by dozens of companies last year over its support for controversial voter suppression laws and other conservative proposals. In 2011, Missouri Republicans introduced right-to-work legislation that was nearly identical to legislation introduced in other states.

Proponents argue that right-to-work laws spur job and economic growth, though there is little evidence backing up those claims. Such laws have, however, been linked to lower wages and less access to health and retirement benefits for workers, both union and non-union alike. Missouri voters overwhelmingly rejected a right-to-work proposal in 1978.

North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory (R) today signed a law that imposes severe cuts to his state’s unemployment insurance program, a change that will also cost jobless workers in the state access to the federal unemployment compensation program.

McCrory’s signature earned him a rebuke from the National Employment Law Project, which said in a release that the law will result in “the most severe cuts to both state and federal unemployment insurance of any state in the nation”:

These heartless cuts, in the state with the fifth-highest jobless rate in the nation, at 9.2 percent, show a shocking disregard for 400,000 unemployed North Carolinians and their families, many of whom will now go from struggling to barely make ends meet to outright struggling to survive. The immediate pain of these cuts will fall on North Carolinians unfortunate enough to lose work through no fault of their own in a weak economy where jobs are scarce. But the entire state will take a hit from the loss of hundreds of millions of dollars in spending at local businesses that would’ve boosted the local and state economies.

The law reduces the maximum benefit allowed from $535 a week to $350 while cutting the number of weeks an unemployed worker is eligible for the program from 26 to 20. As a result, 170,000 jobless North Carolinians will also lose access to $780 million in federal unemployment funds. The average unemployed worker in the United States has been off the job for 35 weeks, meaning many jobless workers will now face the prospect of searching for a new job without access to a safety net program.

Republican state senators have touted the law as “re-employment” program, even though research suggests that workers who receive unemployment benefits search harder for jobs than those who don’t. McCrory, meanwhile, praised the fiscal responsibility of the law, which will allow North Carolina to pay back money owed to the federal government a measly three years earlier than it would have under the old program.

Last week, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) gained a deserved amount of attention for grilling bank regulators on whether the nation’s biggest financial firms have become “too big for trial.” But she wasn’t the only one chasing regulators for answers on how to rein in the nation’s banking behemoths.

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) wanted to know why regulators aren’t looking at reimplementing a wall between traditional commercial banking and risky investment banking like the Depression-era Glass-Steagall law. “If it worked so well for so many years why do you all not believe that it’s something we should return to or look at?” Manchin asked:

Glass-Steagall was put in place in 1933 to prevent exactly what happened to us. It was in place, I think for approximately 66 years, until it was repealed. Up until the 70s, it worked pretty well. We start seeing some changes and chipping away with new rules that took some powers away from Glass-Steagall. And then we finally repeal in 1999 and the collapse in 2008. The Volcker Rule, and I know it doesn’t do what the Glass-Steagall does, why wouldn’t we have those protections? If it worked so well for so many years why do you all not believe that it’s something we should return to or look at?

Watch it:

Federal Reserve Board governor Daniel Tarullo, while not endorsing a return to Glass-Steagall, did admit that “the mistake lay in not substituting a new, more robust set of structures and measures that could take account of the intertwining of conventional lending with capital markets. That process of pulling away old regulations, but not putting in place new, modernized, responsive regulation, I think that’s what left us vulnerable.” Tarullo has previously called for limiting banks’ size to a certain percentage of the economy.

Currently, the largest 0.2 percent of banks (just 12 institutions) control 69 percent of bank assets. As Demos noted in a report, the financial sector sucks $635 billion every year out of the economy that could otherwise go to more productive uses.

Manchin is hardly alone in calling for a re-examination of whether the biggest banks need to be so big. “These banks are not just too big to fail, they’re too big to manage,” said Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) told ThinkProgress. “I think these banks will be stronger and healthier and probably more profitable if they’re smaller.”

Former Republican Senator Alan Simpson and former Clinton White House Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles will release a new plan today to reduce the deficit by $2.4 trillion over the next decade. The pair of deficit hawks previously co-chaired a 2010 commission on fiscal reform (which failed) and then released a proposal for $6.3 trillion in deficit reduction.

That plan became a go-to talking point for Republicans — except, of course, whenever Obama recommended similar targets.

The new Simpson-Bowles plan adds an additional $2.4 trillion in savings onto the approximately $2.4 trillion in deficit reduction the United States has already carried out since 2010. Roughly three-fourths of that new $2.4 trillion would come from spending cuts and savings on interest payments:

The outline below is not meant as a revision to the original Fiscal Commission plan, but rather builds upon where elected leaders were in their negotiations last year. […]

[W]e call for an additional $2.4 trillion of deficit reduction over the next ten years. Roughly one quarter of those savings should come from health care reforms and another quarter from tax reform. The remaining savings should come from a combination of mandatory spending cuts, stronger discretionary caps, cross-cutting changes such as adopting the chained CPI for inflation-indexed provisions in the budget, and lower interest payments. This $2.4 trillion should exclude savings from policies such as the war drawdown.

There’s a very simple problem with Simpson and Bowles’ latest proposal: It represents a massive shift away from their own previous target and towards even more spending cuts.

As the Center On Budget and Policy Priorities previously laid out, the original 2010 Simpson-Bowles plan split its $6.3 trillion in deficit savings between $2.9 trillion in spending cuts, $2.6 trillion in tax revenue, and $800 billion in reduced interest payments on the debt. Since then, the country has passed roughly half of those recommended spending cuts — but less than a quarter of the recommended tax increases, according to recent calculations from the Center for American Progress.

Between the budget deals in the spring of 2011 and the Budget Control Act, which averted the debt ceiling crisis that same year, spending has been cut by $1.5 trillion and interest payments reduced by another $200 billion. Then the American Taxpayer Relief Act, which solved the impasse over the “fiscal cliff,” raised $600 billion in new tax revenue.

So if Simpson-Bowles are interested in “building upon” what lawmakers have already achieved, the logical thing to propose is another $1.4 trillion in spending cuts plus another $2 trillion in additional tax revenue. Or if they’re happy with their new $4.8 trillion target — rather than the original $6.3 trillion — their new proposal should heavily favor tax increases, since deficit reduction so far has favored spending cuts by three to one. Instead, Simpson and Bowles are proposing $1.8 trillion in new spending cuts and reduced interest payments, and only $600 billion in additional revenue.

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The Eurozone has seen economic growth sputter and joblessness spike in the wake of severe austerity measures adopted over the last several years. But while most of the EU (along with Great Britain) is doubling down on austerity, French President Francois Hollande is calling for the opposite. During a trip to Athens (poster child of Europe’s economic catastrophe), Hollande inveighed against “austerity without end“:

François Hollande will make his first visit as French president to Greece on Tuesday carrying the same anti-austerity message to Athens that won him election to the Élysée Palace last May.

As he put it in a pre-visit interview with the Athens newspaper Ta Nea, it was essential for Europe to support growth in Greece, reeling from years of financial crisis and recession. “I reject a Europe that condemns countries to austerity without end,” he declared.

The complicating factor, as the Financial Times Hugh Carnegy noted, is that France is bound by the same budget targets as the rest of the EU, so it may have to engage in more austerity. But France’s Finance Minister is making some noise about breaking with France’s earlier budget targets. “I don’t think our credibility will be damaged if something exceptional intervenes,” finance minister Pierre Moscovici said yesterday. “If we have a deeper recession, we’ll have an even tougher time hitting our targets. We must not add austerity to the risk of recession.”

As this chart shows, European austerity has gone hand in hand with increasing unemployment (even as EU debt loads have increased):

Meanwhile, here in the U.S., Republicans are embracing austerity of their own, cheerleading huge looming, budget cuts.