Eurozone-area unemployment, still plagued by a continent-wide push for austerity, rose to yet another record high in March, and 12.1 percent of Europeans are now unemployed. Spain’s economy contracted for the seventh consecutive quarter in the first three months of 2013, and across the continent, growth is stagnant. Even Germany, home to Europe’s strongest economy and its biggest deficit hawk in Chancellor Angela Merkel, is seeing higher unemployment.

That has led European leaders to rethink their focus on austerity, largely at the urging of American officials. European officials pledged to rein in austerity efforts earlier this month, and European Union president Jose Manuel Barroso said last week that the EU was considering easing its austerity policies and deficit reduction targets to help boost growth. Others have gone farther, with officials in France and Italy calling for total abandonment of austerity, the Washington Post reports:

In France, the doubts have spread to President Francois Hollande’s Socialist Party and government, with officials suggesting that the debt-ridden continent needs to stimulate growth at all costs — even including more debt — if it is to climb out of the economic and financial crisis that began unfurling in 2008. [...]

“Italy is dying because of austerity alone,” that country’s new prime minister, Enrico Letta, complained in his first address to Parliament on Monday. “Stimulus policies can no longer wait.”

European leaders haven’t yet abandoned austerity to focus on growth that would help countries like Spain and Greece — where unemployment rates top 25 percent — but they are at least considering it. But even as the U.S. pushes those reconsiderations, lawmakers here remain focused not on growth that would help reduce America’s own persistently high unemployment rate but on reducing deficits and debt. Sequestration, the automatic budget cuts that went into effect on March 1, is America’s most irresponsible form of deficit reduction yet, and despite its gutting of vital programs and its harmful effects on economic growth, Republicans in Congress have shown no willingness to abandon it in favor of policies that would actually help the economy.

The U.S. bucked the European trend toward austerity in 2009, when President Obama signed a large stimulus bill into law that halted the recession and turned the economy around. The stimulus put the U.S. on a faster pace of growth than Europe experienced, but the focus on deficit reduction since then has only prevented the recovery from taking full effect. Though government spending has typically driven economic recoveries in the United States, it has plateaued amid deficit reduction efforts and perpetual manufactured crises (like the 2011 debt ceiling debacle) since 2010. Instead of helping the recovery, those efforts have only hurt it. But even as some European leaders rethink austerity, and even with evidence that stimulative policies sparked a better recovery than Europe’s, American lawmakers remain committed to spending cuts that will only hinder efforts to grow the economy and reduce unemployment.

United States Treasury Secretary Jack Lew used his first official visit to the European Union to urge leaders there to rein in their austerity efforts and instead focus on economic growth. A week later, it appears the pressure may have worked, as Euro leaders ahead of the G20 summit in Brussels this week pledged to lessen their austerity efforts in the near future, Reuters reports:

The euro zone will slow its budgetary belt-tightening to help reinvigorate economic growth, a top EU official said on Thursday, highlighting a policy shift the United States has long been pressing for.

“They are preaching to the converted,” EU Economic and Monetary Affairs Commissioner Olli Rehn told Reuters.

While European leaders argue that they had no choice but to pursue austerity in the wake of the financial crisis, when bond yields rose and the financial stability of nations like Greece, Italy, and Spain was in doubt, the focus on debt reduction has hampered economic growth. Eurozone unemployment is at record highs and the continent is back in a recession, and even the largest European economies have lagged. Great Britain, which has its own central bank and isn’t tied to the Euro, has also pursued austerity, and the results have been similar: unemployment has continued to rise and the country is on the brink of its third recession in four years.

The United States grew immediately after the recession, thanks in large part because it embraced stimulative policies instead of immediate austerity. Despite its anti-austerity urgings to the Europeans, America has since turned its attention to deficit reduction, and growth has slowed because of it. Government spending has plateaued since 2010, so instead of sparking recoveries as it traditionally has, fiscal policy has acted as a drag on the economy. The Federal Reserve has aided the recovery with stimulative monetary policies, but with borrowing costs at historic lows and unemployment still high, the U.S. could stand to heed its own advice and focus on immediate growth instead of the size of its deficits, which would naturally shrink as the economy grows anyway.

On his first official trip to Europe as head of the United States Treasury, Secretary Jack Lew urged European political and financial leaders to rethink the painful austerity plans they have enacted to address large debts and deficits across the continent and in some of Europe’s largest economies, including Spain, France, Italy, and Portugal.

European austerity has driven unemployment in the Eurozone to record highs and pushed the continent back into recession. With that in mind — and with the European economy putting headwind on the American recovery — Lew pushed European leaders to focus more on demand and employment than on deficits and debt, the Associated Press reports:

Lew, who became treasury secretary in February, started his first official trip to Europe with a meeting with EU Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso. He also met the EU’s top economic and monetary official, Commissioner Olli Rehn, and EU Council President Herman Van Rompuy.

“I was particularly interested in our European partners’ plans to strengthen sources of demand at a time of rising unemployment,” he said, speaking alongside Van Rompuy.

While austerity was meant to address deficits, it hasn’t done a particularly strong job on that front either. Countries have missed deficit targets because of slumping growth caused by rapid fiscal contraction, resulting in an austerity death spiral: countries cut spending to reduce deficits, but those spending cuts lead to slower growth that in turn makes deficits larger, causing calls for even deeper spending cuts. The United Kingdom, for instance, stands on the brink of its third recession in four years even as its austerity measures have barely achieved deficit reduction at all.

The U.S. has proceeded toward recovery much faster than its European counterparts because it focused on demand with a large stimulus package in 2009; since then, Republicans in Congress have turned the conversation to reducing spending and blocked efforts to further boost demand and employment, including the American Jobs Act, which economists said would create more than a million jobs. As a result, government spending has plateaued in the last three years and failed to pull the economy toward a full recovery as it typically has after American recessions.

The 17-nation Eurozone set another dubious record in the opening months of 2013, as its unemployment rate continued to climb from its already record-high rate. The jobless rate also rose for the European Union as a whole as austerity efforts continue to plague the continent’s recovery from the Great Recession:

The jobless rate reached 12 percent in both January and February, the highest since the creation of the euro in 1999, Eurostat, the statistical agency of the European Union, reported from Luxembourg.

The January jobless rate for the 17-nation currency union was revised upward from the previously reported 11.9 percent.

For the overall European Union, the February jobless rate rose to 10.9 percent from 10.8 percent in January, Eurostat said, with more than 26 million people without work across the 27-nation bloc.

Despite clear warnings that austerity isn’t boosting growth, some of the continent’s largest economies remain committed to deficit reduction. The United Kingdom, now on the precipice of its third recession in four years, has indicated that it will continue efforts to reduce the deficit, even as it has fallen far short of its past goals. The UK, in fact, has largely failed to put a dent in its deficit because austere policies have inhibited economic growth. Even Germany, the continent’s stalwart economy through the initial recovery, is lagging, and France announced last month that it would not seek to hit its deficit targets in 2013.

The United States took a different approach to recovery, boosting the economy with President Obama’s stimulus plan in 2009 and putting itself on a better path for growth than Europe has experienced. But it too has since embraced austerity. Government spending has traditionally boosted the economy out of downturns, but it has plateaued in recent years and has instead hamstrung the current recovery. Further budget cuts, such as the across-the-board sequester that went into effect March 1, could only make that worse.

Thus far, a rising housing market and strong retail sales provide evidence that the U.S. is still recovering, but manufacturing numbers slumped in March largely on concerns about how budget cuts would effect the economy. And while conservatives still claim that America’s “runaway spending” is harming the recovery, the truth is that the U.S. isn’t spending enough to give its economy the boost it needs to leave the Great Recession fully behind it.

The bastion of acceptable center-right opinion in Europe, The Economist magazine (or newspaper as they like to call it), ran a special report earlier this year on the success of the governing model of the Nordic nations trying to claim that the most egalitarian, feminist, social democratic nations in the world are shining examples of the wonders of conservative thinking.  If only we had these kind of conservatives in the United States.

Not surprisingly, as Joseph Schwartz noted recently in an article for Dissent magazine, The Economist report places inordinate attention on the libertarian side of Nordic life and less on the long standing tradition and success of social democracy in these countries:

The Economist never once mentions that the Nordic economic model of growth-with-equity derives from the continued existence of a powerful labor movement (union density is above 70 percent in each country, versus 11.3 percent in the United States and 17 percent in Great Britain). Nor does it tell us that the historical dominance of social democracy means that Nordic conservative parties resemble Obama-style Democrats. Even as social democratic parties move in and out of government, the “Nordic model” draws heavily upon the egalitarian values of its labor movement and social democratic parties.

The publics in these countries trust government because the social democrats built their welfare state upon a vision of comprehensive and universal social rights. All members of society receive publicly financed health care, child care, and education. The central government ensures that these goods are financed equitably and are of high quality—so the upper-middle class remains loyal to these services and gladly pays the high taxes to support them. The Nordic nations long ago recognized that means-tested programs end up being poorly funded and unsustainable because they are often opposed by those just above the poverty line. (The vicious politics of “welfare reform” in Britain and the United States depended upon only the poor being eligible for child-care support from the state.)

The Economist is clearly a free-market organ (albeit less doctrinaire than we are used to here in the U.S.)  and not in the business of defending progressive politics.  But it is still striking that much of the European right has decided to embrace and work with a hybrid model of social democracy and liberalism while their counterparts in the U.S. continue to go down a dead-end path of straight hostility and antagonism to all things public outside of the military.

Paul Ryan has tried recently to argue that his budget plans are a way to save the welfare state and ensure that vital public needs can be funded in the future.  If Ryan were, say, a moderate Swedish conservative, this might be believable.  But he’s the intellectual leader of the U.S. House Republicans and the Tea Party caucus, making it more than a little hard to put trust in his professed love for the welfare state.  American conservatives and the GOP have a majority in reach if they could find a way to drop the obvious hatred of government and their disdain for people who rely on the helping hand of the state to get by in our modern economic life, but they haven’t.

Conservatives don’t need to accept European-style social democracy.   But acceptance of the 20th century progressive accomplishments — like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment insurance, public interest regulations, national infrastructure investment, and funding for public education — might be a good place to start if they want to convince Americans that they understand their values and needs in the 21st century.

British Prime Minister David Cameron will use a speech Thursday to reiterate his commitment to the austerity policies that have hampered the nation’s economic recovery since the Great Recession. Great Britain is on the brink of an unprecedented triple-dip recession, but Cameron and United Kingdom finance chief George Osborne have pledged to continue deficit reduction efforts.

Turning away from austerity now, Cameron will say, would send Britain “back into the abyss,” Reuters reports:

However, Cameron will tell his audience he has cut the country’s deficit by a quarter, interest rates are at a record low, exports are reviving, the number of people on welfare has fallen, and there are more people in work “than ever before in our history”.

“Of course, these signs of progress are just the beginning of a long hard road to a better Britain,” he will say.

Britain’s deficit has fallen, but it has done so far more slowly than Osborne and Cameron projected when they began austerity three years ago. In 2010, the British government projected that austerity would reduce the deficit from 4.8 percent of the economy to just 1.9 percent by now. Anemic economic growth and a second recession brought on by those policies, however, have left the deficit at 4.3 percent. The country is now one quarter of contraction away from its third recession in four years.

Austerity has plagued the European Union, of which Britain is a member, since the recession, forcing unemployment to record highs. Britain, however, is not a member of the European currency union and maintains its own central bank, making the conservative government’s continued adherence to deficit reduction all the more confounding. The same could be said of the United States, which is now focused almost solely on deficit reduction even as unemployment remains high, the recovery remains tepid, and evidence exists that the stimulative policies it originally pursued put it on a faster pace of recovery than Europe has experienced.

The European Commission today revised previous estimates showing that Europe would return to economic growth this year, now saying that the continent may be mired in recession until 2014 due in part to “record joblessness“:

The 17-nation bloc’s economy, which generates nearly a fifth of global output, will shrink 0.3 percent in 2013, the Commission said, meaning the euro zone will remain in its second recession since 2009 for a year longer than originally foreseen.

The Commission, the EU executive, late last year forecast 0.1 percent growth in the euro zone’s economy for 2012, but now says tight lending conditions for companies and households, job cuts and frozen investment have delayed an expected recovery.

Of course, one of the causes of record joblessness is the continued austerity to which Europe has been subjected thanks to, among others, the European Commission. This chart shows that austerity has gone hand-in-hand with economic contraction in Europe:

But the European Commission has shown no evidence that it plans to recommend a move away towards austerity. And Eurozone officials can’t even handle mild criticism of their continued adherence to a policy that has delivered none of the promised results without lashing out. In the meantime, misery on the continent continues.