Congressional leaders went to the White House on Friday in a last-ditch effort to avert the automatic “sequester” budget cuts that will soon go into effect. After the meeting, Republican leaders Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and John Boehner (R-OH) emerged to reemphasize that the GOP will not consider any new revenues in a deal to avert the sequester.

Boehner said, “the discussion about revenue, in my view, is over.” And McConnell added, “I want to make clear that any solutions will be done through the regular order, with input from both sides of the aisle in public debate…I will not be part of any back-room deal and I will absolutely not agree to increase taxes.”

As the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent noted, this position is absurd, and akin to Democrats demanding that 100 percent of future deficit reduction be achieved through tax hikes. As this chart shows, nearly three-quarters of deficit reduction that has been achieved since 2011 has been through spending cuts:

Republicans have a habit of dismissing the $1.5 trillion in spending cuts that President Obama has signed into law, while bringing up the $600 billion of revenue he signed constantly, as highlighted in this video. In fact, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) explicitly said that spending cuts adopted by the last Congress shouldn’t be taken into account when discussing how to reduce the deficit, but revenue increases adopted by that same Congress should.

And at the end of the day, all of the deficit reduction talk ignores the fact that the problem with government spending at the moment is that it is too low, not too high.

Republicans often tout the 1996 welfare reform law as one of the great bipartisan victories Congress has achieved. Welfare reform, however, has a checkered past, as it has resulted in a failure to get aid to the families and children who need it most.

According to a new analysis from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) didn’t come close to keeping up with the substantial rise in unemployment that occurred during the Great Recession. In fact, according to CBPP, it took TANF seven months after the recession began to show any growth in caseloads.

When its growth peaked in December 2010, the program had grown by just 16 percent even as unemployment swelled by 88 percent in the same time period:

The rate of families with children in poverty that received TANF benefits fell in 35 states from 2007 to 2011. It rose in just five. The block granting of benefits to states, a change made in the 1996 reform at the request of Republicans, largely caused the negative change, since crunched budgets led many states to make their programs stingier than they were before the recession.

Social safety net programs should swell during economic downturns as they work to mitigate the effects of high unemployment and keep millions of Americans out of poverty. Indeed, several of America’s safety net programs, like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, did just that. But TANF failed to keep up, making the recession worse for millions of families it could and should have kept out of poverty.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke this week patiently tried to explain to Congress how budget cuts in a weak economy can actually be counterproductive for deficit reduction. By stifling economic growth, those cuts cause more joblessness, thereby reducing revenue and increasing expenditures for programs like unemployment insurance.

The so-called “sequester” that goes into effect today barring a last-minute deal by Congress will knock 0.6 percent off economic growth and kill up to 750,000 jobs, according to independent estimates. But there’s at least one more way in which the sequester could hurt revenue — by cutting the budget of the Internal Revenue Service, the very agency charged with collecting revenue:

Here’s some welcome sequester news: The Internal Revenue Service says those across-the-board automatic spending cuts will not delay processing of individual income tax refunds, and may mean fewer audits.

The agency has warned its more than 100,000 employees to expect furloughs of one day per pay period — but not until this summer, after tax filing season ends. [...]

However, once staff cut-backs begin to take hold, the collection agency says, taxpayers could experience delays on calls to help lines and visits to taxpayer assistance centers. They will also face potentially fewer audits, with less staff to perform the reviews.

The IRS estimates that every dollar spent on enforcement brings in $4-$5 dollars of additional revenue. As Reuters’ David Cay Johnston found, every hour spent on corporate tax enforcement bring in more than $9,000 in revenue.

Already, the IRS has been facing a bigger job with fewer resources. The sequester is going to make that worse, and in the meantime, won’t even accomplish its core goal.

Amtrak served a record 31.2 million customers in 2012, a 55 percent increase since 1997 that makes it America’s fastest-growing method of transportation, according to a new study from the Brookings-Rockefeller Project on State and Metropolitan Innovation. Nearly all of the growth took place on Amtrak’s shorter routes, especially in the Northeast Corridor that connects Washington D.C. and New England.

The growth in rail travel has generated calls to boost investments. But those efforts have been spurned by Republicans both in Congress and at the state level who object to government subsidization of Amtrak, which receives nearly $1.5 billion a year in subsidies from the federal government.

That focus, however intense, is misguided and ignores the heavy spending on other forms of travel in the United States. The Department of Transportation’s 2012 budget included more than $70 billion for highways and $18.7 billion for the Federal Aviation Administration, but just $8.3 billion for the Federal Railroad Administration. Over the last half-century, the U.S. has spent far more on highways and air travel than it has on railroads:

Much of the spending on roads, highways, and air travel is financed through user fees, but the government has also subsidized other forms of travel. In the last four years alone, lagging user fees have forced the government to provide the Highway Trust Fund with more than $50 billion, more than it has spent on Amtrak since it started in 1971. The airline industry has depended on numerous federal bailouts and government support for construction, security, and more affordable ticket prices.

Amtrak could be more efficient, but it also now covers 85 percent of its operating costs and its per-ticket subsidies are largely in line with other industries. America has always subsidized travel and transportation to make it safer and more affordable and to foster commerce and economic growth, and with overall borrowing costs low and Amtrak breaking ridership records nearly every year, the government should be focusing on how to improve and expand rail transportation, not on cutting what little money those projects receive now.

Barring a miracle of bipartisan cooperation over the next 12 hours, the sequester — a series of across-the-board spending cuts — will kick in tonight.

Part of the Budget Control Act of 2011, the sequester will likely shave 700,000 jobs and 0.6 percent worth of growth off the economy. Its cuts were designed to be so crude and damaging they would incentivize all sides to replace it with more well-thought out deficit reduction.

But thanks to the GOP’s single-minded fixation on spending cuts over tax increases, that effort failed. Republicans spent the last two years treating every debate over the deficit as if it were occurring in a historical vacuum, accusing Obama of failing his own commitment to balance, repeatedly scoffing at new tax revenue, and insisting that “it’s finally time” to “get serious” about cutting spending, even as trillions of dollars in cuts mounted.

In short, the GOP has repeatedly thrown the spending cuts from each previous deal down the memory hole, demanding more and more while claiming that Obama and Democrats have unreasonably wanted to balance those cuts with new revenue. ThinkProgress has the video report. Watch it:

Between the spring 2011 budget fight, the debt ceiling debacle, and the so-called “fiscal cliff,” the United States has cut almost $1.5 trillion in spending over the next decade, plus saving roughly $200 billion more in lower interest payments.

In fact, at the Wall Street Journal breakfast featured in the video, reporter Lori Montgomery brought up all these previous cuts point blank with Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI). Ryan’s rejoinder encapsulated the entire bizarre kabuki dance: “That was last session. We’re going forward now.” Montgomery and the other reporters literally busted out laughing in response. (Ryan’s logic doesn’t even work on its on terms. The new tax revenues in the fiscal cliff deal were part of the last congressional session as well, but he wants to count those.)

Meanwhile, on the opposite side of the budget ledger, the country will raise only $630 billion in new tax revenue over the next decade. That’s the context in which Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) insists “the tax issue is finished,” even as both he and Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) claim to be seeking a “balanced” agreement. As a result, everything from Medicare, to the military, food safety, air traffic control, nutritional support for women and infants, disaster relief, law enforcement, and health research looks likely to get the axe.

Each and every month recently has brought more miserable economic news from Europe. Today was no exception, as the latest data from Eurostat, Europe’s official statistics agency, shows that the continent broke yet another record for unemployment, as joblessness hit 11.9 percent. That translates to 19 million people out of work in the Eurozone alone (and 26 million across all of the European Union):

Unemployment in the 17-nation euro zone stood at 11.9 percent in January, up from 11.8 percent in December, and from 10.8 percent in January 2012, Eurostat, the statistical office of the European Union, reported from Luxembourg. [...]

European unemployment bottomed in early 2008, just as the financial crisis was getting in motion, and has been on a rising trend ever since. The January numbers were the highest since the creation of the euro.

In absolute terms, Eurostat estimated Friday, 19 million people in the euro zone and more than 26 million people in the overall European Union. were unemployed.

Here’s a chart from Lily Kuo showing the rise in European unemployment:

These numbers should show that Europe’s adherence to austerity is not working. But European Union officials have said that they will not abandon their push to slash spending as a way to turn their economy around.