During an interview with Time Magazine’s Mark Halperin, 2012 presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney admitted that drastic spending cuts will hurt the economy, creating a “recession or depression“:

HALPERIN: You have a plan, as you said, over a number of years, to reduce spending dramatically. Why not in the first year, if you’re elected — why not in 2013, go all the way and propose the kind of budget with spending restraints, that you’d like to see after four years in office? Why not do it more quickly?

ROMNEY: Well because, if you take a trillion dollars for instance, out of the first year of the federal budget, that would shrink GDP over 5%. That is by definition throwing us into recession or depression. So I’m not going to do that, of course. What you do is you make adjustments on a basis that show, in the first year, actions that over time get you to a balanced budget.

This, of course, is the point that progressives have been making in response to the House Republican budget, which Romney supports. According to estimates from the Economic Policy Institute, the cuts in the House GOP budget — authored by Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) — would cost the economy 4.1 million jobs over the next two years due to the $400 billion in spending cuts for which it calls. As Esquire’s Charles Pierce, who flagged this particular exchange in the interview, wrote, “didn’t Romney, in saying that, pretty much blow up the entire rationale for over 30 years of Republican economics right there? Cutting government spending will throw us into a recession or depression?”

Europe is already struggling under the weight of austerity, with its economy contracting at the fastest pace in three years. Romney seems to understand the effect that cutting the budget indiscriminately in the short-term will have, yet he’s backing a budget that fails to acknowledge it.

Two of the nation’s top financial regulatory agencies don’t have enough funding to competently regulate the Wall Street banks they oversee, top regulatory officials told the Senate Banking Committee yesterday. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) both took on new regulatory responsibilities under the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act, but multiple rounds of Republican-led budget cuts aimed at neutering the new law have left them without sufficient funding to carry out those mandates.

As a result, the agencies are “outgunned” by the Wall Street banks they oversee, SEC head Mary Schapiro and CFTC head Gary Gensler told the committee Tuesday, the Huffington Post reports:

“We’re way underfunded at the CFTC,” Gensler told lawmakers, after a question on the subject from Senator Chuck Schumer (D- N.Y.). “Imagine if, all of a sudden, there are eight times the number of teams on the [football] field, but only seven refs,” Gensler said. “There would be would be mayhem on the field. The fans would lose confidence.”

SEC chief Schapiro echoed the point: “We’ve been asked to take on very significant new responsibilities,” she said. Though the SEC has made progress in hiring new staffers and improving its technological capabilities, Schapiro conceded that, in some areas, the efforts haven’t gone far enough.

As ThinkProgress noted in January, adequately funding the CFTC and SEC is imperative to successfully implementing new regulations and policing Wall Street. Republicans oppose those efforts and have repeatedly pushed for cuts to the agencies’ budgets. “The less we fund those agencies,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said last June, “the better America will be.”

The SEC is funded by fees paid by banks, not by taxpayers, so cuts to its budget won’t affect the federal deficit. But it is prohibited from collecting more in fees than it is allocated in the budget, so the $225 million cut Republicans pushed last year amounts to a massive giveaway to Wall Street, which will save exactly that amount.

As the 2008 financial crisis demonstrated, failure to police Wall Street can have perilous consequences for American taxpayers and the economy. But when one party’s purpose, as Rep. Spencer Bachus (R-AL) said last year, is to “serve the banks,” preventing another such fiasco is apparently of little matter.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops sent letters to various Congressional committees last month criticizing the “unjustified and wrong” cuts to food stamps, health care, and other safety net programs contained in the House GOP’s budget, authored by Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI), a practicing Catholic. Today, the Bishops sent another letter to members of Congress slamming the GOP’s attempts to cut similar programs in a reconciliation package that will set spending levels for the next fiscal year.

The GOP’s reconciliation program, a result of the Budget Control Act that raised the nation’s debt ceiling last August, includes cuts to programs that help the poor, such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the Child Tax Credit, and the Social Services Block Grant, which provides money for various aid programs. The proposed cuts fail a “basic moral test” that all budgets should adhere to, Rev. Steven E. Blaine, chairman of the USCCB’s Committee on Domestic Justice and Human Development, wrote in the letter:

The proposed cuts to programs in the budget reconciliation fail this basic moral test. The Catechism of the Catholic Church states it is the proper role of government to “make accessible to each what is needed to lead a truly human life: food, clothing, health, work, education and culture, suitable information, the right to establish a family, and so on” (no. 1908). Poor and vulnerable people do not have powerful lobbyists to advocate their interests, but they have the most compelling needs.

As you pursue responsible deficit reduction, the Catholic bishops join other faith leaders and people of good will urging you to protect the lives and dignity of poor and vulnerable families by putting a circle of protection around these essential programs and to refrain from cutting programs that serve them.

As ThinkProgress noted yesterday, the GOP’s cuts would affect at least 28 million people, including 2 million who would lose SNAP assistance, 750,000 who would lose health insurance, and 23 million who would lose benefits from the Social Services Block Grant. All 47 million who receive SNAP assistance would face benefit cuts.

The GOP made deeper cuts than required to programs for the poor to preserve the nation’s bloated defense budget, but their deficit reduction efforts are miniscule compared to their attempts to preserve massive tax cuts for the rich. Republicans announced last week that they wouldn’t pay for an extension of the Bush tax cuts, meaning they have chosen to sacrifice beneficial programs for the poor to cut the deficit, while upholding tax breaks for the richest Americans.

Three federal government agencies that collect and analyze American economic data could face spending cuts under the House Republican budget, jeopardizing important funds won by the agencies in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.

The U.S. Census Bureau began fighting for extra funding in the 1990s and pushed for more money to study real estate and financial data in 2003, arguing that the analysis was important to measure growing markets in the American economy. It didn’t win the funding until 2009, though, after the financial crisis had already hit, Bloomberg BusinessWeek reports:

Finally, in early 2009, after the real estate-fueled financial crisis, Congress gave Census what it had been asking for—an extra $8.1 million. In the view of many, it was too late. “That’s a grand example of how nickel-and-diming statistics agencies can screw up the economy,” says Andrew Reamer, a research professor at the George Washington University Institute of Public Policy and a member of the BEA’s advisory committee. “The government saved $8 million, but how many trillions were lost as a result of not being able to see the crisis coming?”

That extra data, says Reamer, would’ve revealed just how quickly certain parts of the economy were slowing down. For example, in April 2008 the BEA, with no quarterly data to work with, estimated that finance and insurance sector activity fell 0.3 percent in 2007. In July 2011, the BEA recrunched those numbers using quarterly data and showed declines of 2.2 percent, 5.3 percent, and 9.9 percent for those sectors in the last three quarters of 2007.

According to Bloomberg, the three agencies that collect and analyze most economic data — the Census Bureau, the Bureau of Economic Analysis, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics — have combined budgets of $1.6 billion, less than a tenth-of-one-percent of the federal budget. But under the Republican budget authored by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI), the agencies are likely to face budget cuts that wipe away the extra funds they received after the financial crisis, a move not even the Chamber of Commerce — a typical GOP ally on deficit reduction — supports.

The House GOP’s budget makes also makes cuts to other programs that resulted from the financial crisis. It repeals reforms that were a part of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act, slashes the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s budget by two-thirds, and eliminates the federal government’s foreclosure prevention program.

Our guest blogger is Rebecca Vallas from the SSI Coalition for Children and Families.

House Republicans recently proposed billions of dollars in cuts to Supplemental Security Income (SSI), a critical income support for kids with severe disabilities who live in households with very low-income and assets. While the proposed cuts amount to just one 1/100th of a percentage point of the federal budget, they would be nothing short of devastating for our nation’s most vulnerable children, and the families who care for them.

The 2013 House Budget Resolution includes $3.5 billion in cuts (over 10 years) to benefits for the hardest-hit youngsters — those in families with more than one child receiving SSI for their disability. Some 150,000 children with severe disabilities would see their critically needed benefits cut dramatically, forcing parents to make impossible choices — whether to meet the needs of one disabled child over the other.

SSI provides income support, and Medicaid in most states, to low-income elderly and disabled Americans, including about 1.3 million children with severe disabilities. Only the most severely impaired children in households with very low income and resources qualify for SSI. Kids receive less than $600 per month, on average. While modest, SSI makes it possible for families to care for their kids with disabilities at home instead of in costly institutions.

It offsets some of the extra expenses related to the child’s disability — like transportation to and from doctors and specialists; adaptive equipment; and specialized child care — many of which may not be covered by private insurance or Medicaid.

It also replaces some of the income lost when a parent reduces his or her hours, or leaves a job altogether to stay home to care for a disabled child. Between 10 and 30 percent of parents (usually mothers) with disabled children report stopping working entirely, and between 15 and 68 percent report cutting work hours to care for their children with disabilities. Even with the income support from SSI, over a third of children receiving SSI remain in poverty.

Families with more than one disabled child are even harder hit. Over 70 percent of families with more than one disabled child receiving SSI report experiencing material hardships such as food insecurity, and housing and utility hardships—even with the income support from SSI.

Kids with disabilities face considerable obstacles. They are more likely to drop out of school, be unemployed, have lower earnings, and receive disability benefits as adults. SSI helps parents provide the services and supports kids with disabilities need, offering them a better chance to achieve self-sufficiency later in life, and saving taxpayer expenditures down the road.

Families raising low-income children with disabilities need more help, not less. Cutting SSI, especially for families raising more than one disabled child, would push already needy children with disabilities deeper into poverty, and would end up costing taxpayer dollars in the long run.

We can and must do better than balancing the budget on the backs of poor, disabled kids.

Click here for more information about the SSI Coalition for Children and Families, or to get involved.

Click here to share your story if SSI has helped your family or someone that you know.

Spain officially plunged into its second recession in three years Monday, just days after the United Kingdom suffered the same fate. The driver of economic slowdowns across the European continent is austerity, the rapid reduction in debt and deficits that fails to address joblessness and leads to economic contraction.

Though the U.S. is experiencing slow but steady economic growth, austere economic policies are jeopardizing the future of the American economy as well. Half of the nation’s recent college graduates are either jobless or underemployed, according to data from Drexel University and the Economic Policy Institute. Republicans seized on the report as proof of President Obama’s failure, but youth employment numbers will only get worse under the GOP’s policies of austerity. That’s because austere government policies hit young workers the hardest, according to a new report from the International Labour Organization, as CNBC reports:

Youth unemployment has been singled out for particular concern in developed economies which critics argue governments have been slow to deal with. [Author of the report Raymond] Torres said the effects of austerity were particularly skewed against youth.

“It’s impossible to see massive declines in youth unemployment unless the economy itself starts to recover, because the youth are disproportionately affected by the stagnation and the recession. There are good practices that show that those countries which combine youth study with work experience do better,” he said.

As Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman notes, Europe provides ample proof of austerity’s failures for young workers. In Ireland, nearly a third of young workers are unemployed. In Spain, the unemployment rate for workers under age 25 tops 50 percent. Across America, public sector budget cuts have hit younger workers hardest. The effects are damning — young workers who enter a depressed workforce spend the rest of their lives making up the lost wages, affecting economic growth for decades.

Conservatives in the United States and Europe have pursued deficit and debt reduction policies with reckless abandon since the end of the Great Recession under the assumption that they would spark investor confidence and inspire growth. The opposite has been true. Austerity is failing across Europe, particularly for the young workers economies will depend on in the future. And yet, Republicans continue to push the same policies right here at home.