House Republicans spent most of their time over the last three years reminding Americans that Senate Democrats hadn’t passed a budget in two, then three, then four years. It was a regular Republican talking point, a particular favorite of House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s. But now that the Senate has returned to regular order by passing a budget, House Republicans are refusing to come to the table to negotiate a long-term spending plan.

Republicans passed their own budget, the plan Ryan authored, in March, and since the proposal differs from the Senate budget, regular order requires the two chambers to come together in conference to iron out their differences in a compromise budget that is then taken back to the full memberships of each house. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) has hinted at forming such a conference for more than a week, but Republicans have shown no willingness to join him. This morning, Senate Republicans blocked Reid from creating a conference committee, a move that led Reid to accuse them of turning “a complete 180″:

“It seems House Republicans don’t want to be seen even discussing the possibility of compromise with the Democrats for fear of a Tea Party revolt,” Reid said.

He noted that Republicans have called for “regular order” for years.

“A strange thing happened: House Republicans did a complete 180 — they flipped. They’re no longer interested in regular order even though they preached that for years,” Reid said.

The GOP offered numerous excuses for why they wouldn’t approve a conference, including that certain rules need to be worked out. Ryan and Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions (R), the ranking member on the Senate Budget Committee, have said they need to agree to “framework” for a deal to make a compromise more likely.

What that “framework” would need to be to get Republicans to agree to conference, however, is clear: a deal that cuts spending but includes no new tax revenue. That has been a consistent GOP demand throughout budget and spending fights over the last three years, a sticking point that has brought the government to the brink of both shutdown and default. It’s also a concession Democrats and President Obama are unwilling to make, given that they have already agreed to nearly $2.5 trillion in spending cuts while receiving little revenue in exchange. Any new deal, in fact, would have to achieve 90 percent of its deficit reduction from tax revenue to balance the overall reductions achieved in the last four years.

The budget plan President Obama released this morning is squarely aimed at brokering a long-term fiscal compromise with House Republicans, who have demanded entitlement cuts and other spending reductions to reduce the nation’s deficit. Obama’s budget mirrors the compromise offer he made to House Speaker John Boehner (R) in fiscal cliff negotiations, offering less in stimulus spending and revenues than he has previously sought and including reforms to Social Security that have infuriated his liberal base.

During an appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Dee Dee Myers asked House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) if Republicans would make similar concessions — perhaps on revenue or stimulus spending — that would bothperturb the GOP’s base. Ryan, however, said that the GOP’s biggest compromise was that it “put up a budget that balances”:

MYERS: You mentioned CPI. It’s something President Obama put on the table that the base doesn’t like. It’s the White House telling the people it’s a sign they’re willing to put something forth to compromise. What are you willing to put on the table that your base won’t like?

RYAN: We put up budget that balances. We’ve said here how you fundamentally restructure Medicaid, Medicare. Lots of these things. The base, we represent seniors as well. We think Medicare reform is the best way to go to save this program. There are a lot of things we’ve done. The fiscal cliff was not real popular, I would add. So we, Republicans, have already done things to move to the middle to get to common ground that have not been entirely popular. But we have not seen reciprocal moves.

A balanced budget offer is hardly a concession that moves toward Democrats and angers the GOP base, given that the party has spent the last three years chasing a Balanced Budget Amendment to the Constitution. The latest House GOP budget, in fact, balances in 10 years — faster than previous versions — because conservatives demanded it in exchange for the last debt ceiling increase. The rest of the budget, meanwhile, is a trove of conservative policy ideals. It turns Medicare into a voucher program, a priority for conservatives. It targets poverty programs conservatives regularly decry for nearly two-thirds of its spending cuts. It includes massive tax cuts aimed primarily at corporations and the wealthy. And it does all of this without making any concessions on issues like stimulus spending and revenues that would bring Democrats to the table while raising concerns among the Republican base.

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.

Over the past three years, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) has repeatedly introduced budget resolutions that contain draconian spending cuts in an effort to stave off the debt crisis he says is right around the corner if it isn’t addressed immediately. Ryan’s plans, all three of which have passed the House of Representatives, would almost surely add to the debt instead of decreasing it, but his main view is that America’s current level of debt is weighing down the economy, a claim he repeated to Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren Thursday night.

“The debt is crushing our economy, it’s slowing us down, and it’s guaranteeing the next generation has a diminished future,” Ryan said. “And we believe we have a moral obligation to balance this budget to get a healthier economy and create jobs.”

The source of those claims is a paper by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff that shows that economies grow more slowly when their debt-to-GDP ratios are in excess of 90 percent. But as Bloomberg reports, there is no economic consensus around those findings, especially when it comes to large economies like the United States:

“The argument that heavy debt loads slow economic growth doesn’t hold a lot of water,” says Guy LeBas, chief fixed- income strategist at Janney Montgomery Scott LLC in Philadelphia who oversees $12 billion. “It suffers from a mix-up of cause and effect: When weak economic conditions arise, it tends to encourage deficit spending, which is what has led to more U.S. debt being issued, and not the other way around.” [...]

“The Rogoff-Reinhart 90 percent is really quite a fragile number,” says Joseph Gagnon, a former economist in the Fed’s monetary affairs division. “There is no threshold like that for countries that have control of the currency they borrow in.”

Moreover, there is no evidence that the debt is threatening the United States in the short-term. Borrowing costs are at historic lows — as Bloomberg notes, the cost of paying off the debt is lower today than it was when Ronald Reagan was president and financial markets are “begging” the U.S. to borrow. Instead, there is plenty of evidence that the focus on debt and deficit reduction has slowed the economic recovery. Government spending has plateaued since the 2009 stimulus effort that kickstarted the recovery, so while government spending traditionally pulls the economy out of recessions, spending cuts hampered efforts to boost the economy this time.

Investments to help the economic recovery now would fuel growth that reduces deficits and, thus, improve America’s long-term debt outlook as well. The current crisis facing the U.S. isn’t a debt crisis, but rather an unemployment crisis that is being exacerbated by lawmakers who focus too much on the debt.

One of House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) favorite ways of defending the House Republicans’ budget is to claim the social safety net represents a moral threat to Americans’ character, as well as a fiscal threat to their country’s budget. He’s incessantly warned of luring “able-bodied people into lives of dependency and complacency” and depriving them “of their will and their incentive to make the most of their lives.” In his latest budget, he introduced his cuts to Medicaid, nutrition assistance, and other support programs for low-income Americans with a warning that the safety net “can create a powerful disincentive to get ahead.”

Included in those cuts is a massive reduction in spending on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). But the Center On Budget and Policy Priorities took a look at the employment situation of Americans who rely on the program, and the reality belies Ryan’s rhetoric:

Among households with children that include an adult who isn’t elderly or disabled, 87 percent of the households receiving SNAP in a given month include an individual who worked in the prior year or will work in the following year.

Ryan actually has an ongoing problem when it comes to honestly representing the SNAP program. Last year, he claimed it was “growing at unsustainable rates” — a notion that fails to account for the effects of the recession, that fails to differentiate spending in raw dollars from spending as a share of the economy, and which utterly ignores the program’s projected path over the next decade.

Ryan’s budget would cut SNAP spending by $135 billion between now and 2023 — requiring either 12 to 13 million of the 44.7 million people currently on the program to be kicked off, or a reduction in benefits of $190 a month for the poorest of American families by 2019. Nor did the 1996 welfare reform law — on which Ryan models his current budget proposals — turn out to be the success he presents it as. In the aftermath of the Great Recession, welfare’s case load grew only 16 percent, even as the numbers of the unemployed increased by 88 percent; an utter failure to keep up with the needs of impoverished Americans.

As for the safety net as a whole, CBPP cites research from the National Bureau of Economic Research that one of every seven Americans would be poor without the safety net, but are above the poverty line because of it — a total of over 40 million people.

A collection of faith groups will today hold protest actions across the country calling on Congress to pass a budget that invests in programs to help low-income Americans instead of giving tax breaks to the wealthy and corporations. The coalition will hold 21 events in 13 states, according to a release from Faith in Public Life, encouraging Congress “to protect families and seniors, reject austerity, and remind them we have enough for all in this country.”

As part of the event, leaders will deliver loaves of bread and fish to Congress, a play on the Biblical story in which Jesus fed 5,000 hungry people with bread and fish. That took “a miracle,” the groups said in a release, but “it doesn’t take a miracle for Congress to pass a moral budget.”

“In Jesus’ time, it took a miracle to feed all the hungry. But today in America, we have enough resources to feed everyone, house everyone, and educate everyone if our leaders have the political will to put the common good before tax breaks for big corporations and the super wealthy,” Rev. Dr. J. Herbert Nelson, II, Director of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) Office of Public Witness, said in a release from Faith in Public Life. “Congress needs political courage, not miracles, to pass a just and moral budget that makes the wealthy pay their fair share and protects struggling families from further hardship.”

One of the events will take place outside the district office of Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), the author of the House Republican budget that would grant tax cuts to the wealthy while finding two-thirds of its budget cuts from programs that help the poor. Faith leaders criticized that budget as “immoral and counter to our values” when it was released last week, and faith groups like the Nuns on the Bus campaign have targeted Ryan and other Republicans for their insistence on similar budget cuts in the past.

The coalition includes interfaith, Christian, and Jewish groups, including the PICO National Network, Interfaith Workers Justice, and NETWORK, the Catholic social justice lobby that organized the Nuns on the Bus campaign.