Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) reiterated Sunday that the automatic budget cuts that began taking effect March 1 were “modest” cuts that would keep the United States from turning into the Western European countries that have spent the last four years battling high unemployment and repeat recessions.

“We have a $16 trillion national debt,” McConnell said. “Our debt is as big as our economy. That alone makes us look like a Western European country.”

European unemployment hit a new record last week, and the Eurozone re-entered recession in November. Spain and Greece both have unemployment rates above 25 percent, and even Germany, the continent’s stalwart economy, is now contracting. Those struggles have largely occurred because Europe has attempted to reduce debt and deficit levels too quickly instead of focusing on growing the economy.

The United States took a different path after the Great Recession, choosing stimulus instead, and it has so far fared better than Europe. But it is now pursuing the same austere path Europe chose, with sequestration’s automatic budget cuts threatening to damage the recovery the U.S. has already made. McConnell claimed that “spending has exploded,” but while government spending has helped lead past economic recoveries, it has plateaued in the last four years and largely failed to help this recovery.

The cuts McConnell called “modest” will likely only make that worse. The Congressional Budget Office projects that it will lead to reduced economic growth and 750,000 lost jobs, and other projections show that it may hinder growth enough to prevent actual deficit reduction. But when Crowley asked McConnell to address those projections, he refused, saying only, “We promised the American people we’d do this a year and a half ago.”

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.

Voters in Italy — while not giving any party firm control of their government — did deliver a rebuke to austerity during yesterday’s national elections. “This election, I think, is the logical consequence of pursuing policies that have dramatically worsened the economic and social picture in Italy,” Simon Tilford, the chief economist of the Center for European Reform, told the New York Times.

But Eurozone Commission President Jose Barroso (who holds the highest EU office) wants to make sure that other Europeans don’t get any ideas regarding ditching their own austerity programs following Italy’s results:

Speaking at a Reuters summit on the future of the euro zone, Barroso said efforts to revive Europe’s economy would take time and required determination. The fact Italian voters had turned Monti out of office did not mean his policies, or those advocated by the European Union, were wrong.

“I hope we are not going to follow the temptation to give in to populism because of the results in one specific member state,” Barroso, speaking with passion, said of the EU’s efforts to combat the sovereign debt crisis.

“The question we have to ask ourselves is the following: should we determine our policy, our economic policy, by short-term electoral considerations or by what has to be done to put Europe back on the path to sustainable growth? For me the answer is clear.” [...]

Barroso said it was incumbent on all EU and euro zone countries, especially those receiving aid from the bloc’s rescue funds, to retool their economies and cut deficits in an effort to improve competitiveness and stimulate growth.

Barrosso is far from the only EU official imploring countries to stay the course, despite the clear evidence that austerity is stifling economic growth in Europe while not delivering significant debt reductions, as these two charts from economists Paul De Grauwe and Yuemei Ji show:

As De Grauwe and Ji wrote, “As it becomes obvious that the austerity programs produce unnecessary sufferings especially for the millions of people who have been thrown into unemployment and poverty, resistance against these programs is likely to increase. A resistance that may lead millions of people to wish to be liberated from what they perceive to be shackles imposed by the euro.”

Last week, the United Kingdom received its first ever credit downgrade, as continued austerity has dragged down the country’s economic growth. Britain’s conservative government, however, is forging ahead. Finance Minister George Osborne yesterday called for the UK to “stick to its course.”

The UK, though, is a prime example for why austerity should be avoided in a weak economy. As this chart from Reuters’ shows, the U.S., which embraced stimulus after the 2008 financial crisis, is in much better shape than the European countries that went for austerity:

As this chart shows, the UK has not at all lived up to the projections for economic growth that were made in 2010:

Austerity has actually had the opposite of its intended effect in the UK, killing growth while not bringing down debt. And that’s held true across Europe, as this chart from economists Paul De Grauwe and Yuemei Ji shows:

The European economy, beset by high unemployment and austerity measures aimed at reducing debts and deficits, will contract again in 2013, according to the continent’s official economic body. That would make 2013 the second consecutive year, and third in the past five, in which the 17-nation Eurozone’s economy will have shrunk, adding to its already record-high unemployment rate and further complicating the deficit reduction efforts it has pursued without fail since the end of the global recession.

Another contraction would especially hit the countries that have already been hurt the most by the recession and resulting austerity, the European Commission said. The Wall Street Journal reports:

The European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, forecasts a 0.3% contraction for 2013 and sees falling spending by businesses, consumers and national governments pushing euro-zone unemployment to a new high. Mass joblessness is expected to increase in the countries hardest hit by the crisis, with the average unemployment rate expected to reach 27% in Greece, 26.9% in Spain and 17.3% in Portugal.

Slow growth, and in some cases the lack of growth at all, has already hampered deficit reduction efforts, causing Spain, Greece, and France to miss deficit targets. French president Francois Hollande announced this week that he would not pursue further austerity to hit this year’s deficit target. The Eurozone officially fell back into recession in November.

European austerity has already proven a terrible failure, driving the continent as a whole back into a recession and pushing unemployment to record levels. Despite promises from leaders across Europe that reducing deficits would spur growth, that hasn’t been the case. And worse yet, the focus on austerity hasn’t even led to the deficit reduction many European countries are chasing.

The United Kingdom has fallen far short of its deficit reduction goals, and France is likely to miss its deficit reduction targets too. Today, Fitch ratings announced that Spain too had missed its target, and it will miss its 2013 target thanks to a lack of economic growth:

Spain to miss 2013 deficit target of 4.5%, due to 1.6% GDP fall, says Fitch. Deficit to be 6%/GDP, debt to peak in 2014-2015 around 96%/GDP.

— Jamie McGeever (@ReutersJamie) February 21, 2013

Though European deficits are declining, they are doing so far more slowly than projected thanks to a lack of economic growth that has made much of the deficit reduction policies counterproductive. European countries continue to cut spending to reduce deficits, causing more fiscal contraction that in turn slows down deficit reduction efforts or, worse, makes deficits larger. When the United Kingdom, which has the economy most comparable to America’s, instituted its first round of austerity in 2010, it projected its deficit would fall from 4.8 percent of GDP to just 1.9 percent. Instead, the country is on the brink of a third recession and its deficit stands at 4.3 percent of its economy. In other deficit-focused countries, unemployment has skyrocketed — Spain’s unemployment rate topped 25 percent in January.

The United States originally approached economic recovery by focusing on stimulus instead of deficit reduction, a path that led to a stronger recovery than Europe’s. But it too has since embraced deficit reduction, the most serious round of which looms on March 1 when sequestration will begin taking effect. Those spending cuts could knock 0.6 percent off of annual economic growth while costing the nation 700,000 jobs. Drops in federal spending have already hurt the recovery, and if Europe is any indication, efforts to rapidly reduce the deficit will likely serve only to reduce growth and complicate deficit reduction efforts instead.

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.

The economic news in Europe continued to get worse on Thursday, as the Eurozone fell even deeper into recession, contracting by 0.6 percent in the fourth quarter. This is the first time since 1995 that the Eurozone has produced no quarters of growth over a full year:

It marked the currency bloc’s first full year in which no quarter produced growth, extending back to 1995. For the year as a whole, gross domestic product (GDP) fell by 0.5 percent.

Economic output in the 17-country region fell by 0.6 percent in the fourth quarter, EU statistics office Eurostat said on Thursday, following a 0.1 percent output drop in the third.

The quarter-on-quarter drop was the steepest since the first quarter of 2009 and more severe than the average forecast of a 0.4 percent drop in a Reuters poll of 61 economists.

Even supposedly mighty Germany saw its economy contract by 0.6 percent. Across the whole of the Eurozone, only Estonia and Slovakia experienced economic growth.

This is more evidence showing that European austerity has been an utter failure. Instead of ushering in prosperity, attempts to slash deficits and debt have actually caused more debt by depressing economic growth. As this chart from Paul Krugman shows, austerity goes hand in hand with unemployment:

But lawmakers in the U.S. still want to follow Europe’s lead, slashing spending while unemployment remains stubbornly high. The so-called “sequester” set to take place on March 1 will cost the country one million jobs, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center.

The conservative Tory government’s austerity policies are pushing the United Kingdom toward an unprecedented triple-dip recession, as the UK’s economy contracted 0.3 percent in the fourth quarter of 2012. If the economy slumps again in the first quarter of this year, the two consecutive quarters of losses will mark Britain’s third recession in four years.

British Prime Minister David Cameron and George Osborne, the nation’s finance minister, eschewed stimulative policies when the Great Recession began, choosing instead to pursue swift deficit reduction to address the nation’s long-term debt. The result has been unfortunate: as this chart from the Guardian shows, the British economy has now contracted in four of the past five quarters (the London Olympics, which helped the British economy, occurred during the one quarter of growth):

When he instituted the first round of austerity in 2010, Osborne said his package of tax increases and spending cuts would reduce the deficit from 4.8 percent of Britain’s economy to just 1.9 percent. Three years and a second recession later, the deficit is at 4.3 percent. But even as his plan to revive the economy to reduce deficits has led to further recessions, Osborne remains steadfast in his belief that deficit reduction is the correct path to follow:

George Osborne said he would not “run away” from the problems facing the UK economy: “We have a reminder today that Britain faces a very difficult economic situation. A reminder that last year was particularly difficult, that we face problems at home because of the debts built up over many years and problems abroad with the eurozone, where we export most of our products, in recession.”

While the British raced to austerity, the United States turned to stimulus in 2009. Instead of pushing us into a second recession, The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act turned around the American economy, which has far outperformed the British economy ever since:

Still, President Obama’s second attempt to stimulate the economy, the American Jobs Act, was blocked by Republicans, and Washington has turned its attention toward immediate deficit reduction since, even as unemployment remains stubbornly high and the economic recovery is far from robust.

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.