Republican efforts to cut the debt and put people back to work would help the United States economy avoid “European-style austerity,” House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) said on NBC’s Meet The Press yesterday.

The House GOP budget seemingly embraces that model, calling for massive reductions in spending like those that have led to double-dip recessions across Europe. And though analyses have found that the budget, which Ryan authored, would actually add to the national debt, the GOP’s vision is necessary to address joblessness and avoid austerity, he said:

RYAN: What we’re saying is let’s get on growth and prevent austerity. The whole premise of our budget is to pre-empt austerity by getting our borrowing under control, having tax reform for economic growth, and preventing Medicare and Social Security and Medicaid from going bankrupt. That pre-empts austerity. The president, his budget, the fact the Senate hasn’t done a budget in three years, puts us on a path towards European-like austerity. That’s what we’re trying to prevent from happening in the first place.

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Not only would Ryan’s plan add to the debt, it would also increase the number of people who are looking for a job, resulting in a net loss of 4.1 million jobs over the next two years, according to the Economic Policy Institute:

The Ryan budget would nevertheless immediately enact aggressive spending cuts — particularly to the social safety net — which would reduce employment by 1.3 million jobs in fiscal 2013 and 2.8 million jobs in fiscal 2014, relative to current budget policies.

Ryan claims he wants to avoid European-style austerity, rein in the debt, and put people back to work. His plan, however, would end similarly to European austerity, leading to higher levels of debt and an unnecessary and unneeded spike in joblessness.

Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s budget would add $10.7 trillion to the debt and reduce federal revenues to just 15 percent of GDP, exploding the “prairie fire of debt” Romney warned the nation about in a speech last week in Iowa.

Romney isn’t the only one decrying the debt while ignoring that his budget would make it worse. House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI), in an appearance on Fox News this morning, made the laughable claim that a budget that explodes the debt will simultaneously prevent a debt crisis:

RYAN: More to the point, though, the kind of budget Mitt Romney is talking about is one that prevents a debt crisis.

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Ryan praised Romney’s 20 percent, across-the-board tax cuts that are paid for, he claims, by closing loopholes that primarily benefit the wealthy. The only problem with that, of course, is that Romney hasn’t laid out such a plan, and even if he did, it wouldn’t make up enough revenue to avoid adding trillions to the national debt.

This isn’t anything new from Ryan. Though he paints himself as a very serious person who is trying to reduce the debt, he authored the House GOP’s radical budget plan, which manages to add to the debt despite cutting spending on programs that help the poor and middle classes because, like Romney, he gives away trillions in tax breaks to the wealthiest Americans.

Mitt Romney yesterday traveled to Iowa, where he decried the “prairie fire of debt” that President Obama has supposedly allowed to engulf the nation. But Romney neglected to mention that his own economic plan would add $10.7 trillion to the debt, reducing federal revenue to just 15 percent of GDP.

As the Associated Press reported today, “Romney’s tax and spending plans don’t support his vow to dampen the debt fire.” But don’t tell that to House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI), who said to MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough that Romney’s tax plan won’t blow up the deficit:

SCARBOROUGH: So you talk about Mitt Romney talking about how he’s going to be responsible. You look at Mitt Romney’s plans, though, you add them all up, the deficit goes up as much under Mitt Romney as it does under Barack Obama. You know, if you look at their plans, there’s not a big difference.

RYAN: Oh, there’s a huge difference. Are you kidding me?

SCARBOROUGH: At the end of the day Paul, how much is the national debt going to be reduced under Mitt Romney’s tax plans and spending plans?

RYAN: So, under Mitt Romney’s tax plan, he’s keeping revenues where they historically have been, which they actually rise from where they are now, just like our budget does.

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But Romney has simply asserted that his tax plan will be deficit neutral, because he will limit tax deductions for the richest Americans, without laying out any way to actually achieve that end. He’s even admitted that this rather relevant part of his plan is missing.

And he hasn’t laid out the spending plans that would supposedly cut the deficit either. As the AP put it, “the closest [Romney] has come to laying out a specific spending plan has been in his endorsement of the budget blueprint passed this year by House Republicans, which also fails to produce his promised deficit reductions.”

Even if Romney actually followed through on his pledge to limits deductions for the rich, he would need 6.5 percent economic growth for the next five years to keep his tax plan from adding to the deficit. The best five-year period of growth since World War II was from 1961 to 1966, when the economy grew at 5.8 percent per year, meaning Romney would have to see the greatest growth of the post-war period simply to keep his tax plan out of the red.

Of course, this is just par for the course for Ryan, who pulled the same trick with the House Republican budget, pledging to close tax loopholes and limit deductions, but refusing to give any specifics.

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.

MOUNT PLEASANT, Wisconsin — Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) made a surprising policy assertion late last week, seemingly telling a Wisconsin town hall that he supports a key financial regulation pushed by President Obama and progressives in Congress.

“If you’re a bank and you want to operate like some non-bank entity like a hedge fund, then don’t be a bank,” Ryan told constituents on Friday. “Don’t let banks use their customers money to do anything other than traditional banking”:

RYAN: I think we should have the same rules apply to everybody else. We should make sure you can’t get too big where you’re going to become too big to fail and trigger a bailout, and if you take risky behavior then you go into bankruptcy and we open up the bankruptcy laws to allow them to go into bankruptcy. And more importantly if you’re a bank and you want to operate like some non-bank entity like a hedge fund, then don’t be a bank. Don’t let banks use their customers money to do anything other than traditional banking. Those to me are the key tenets of reform which we did not see happen.

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A proposal doing almost exactly that — known as the Volcker Rule, after former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker — was part of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law and has been opposed by most Republicans in Congress. The Volcker Rule largely bans banks that are backed by taxpayers from engaging in risky proprietary trading, limiting such activity to hedge funds and institutions that are not federally insured. With the Volcker Rule in effect, banks would either give up the sort of trading that played a major role in the financial crisis or forfeit their access to the Federal Reserve’s emergency lending and the FDIC’s backing.

While Ryan talks like someone who wants to rein in Wall Street at town hall meetings, it isn’t always the game he plays in Washington. Ryan opposed Dodd-Frank, and his biggest backer is the financial industry, which has had so much success lobbying to water down the rule that not even Volcker himself is satisfied with it anymore.