I’d like to believe the Obama Administration when they show concern over rising austerity programs in Europe. But I agree with Chris Bowers that it’s just wrong to assert that they haven’t caught the bug themselves. The White House has talked a good game on fiscal stimulus and continuing support for the economy, but they haven’t been able to move Congress even a little bit, and they have adopted just as many austerity measures in their own right. Consider:

Here is what is actually happening in U.S. policy right now:

• A weak jobs bill, which already went through deep cuts in both the House and Senate, is going down to complete defeat in the Senate:

Democratic leaders in the Senate have apparently failed to win enough support to overcome a Republican filibuster of a bill to help the poor, the old and the jobless, despite making a series of cuts to the measure over the past several weeks to appease deficit hawks.

“It looks like we’re going to come up short,” said a senior Democratic aide on Wednesday evening.

• Congressional leaders and the White House have agreed on a three-year freeze in non-military discrentionary spending, and the White House has ordered federal agencies to trim their budgets by 5% on top of that freeze. While agencies will be allowed to cut half of the latter cuts, that still represents a 2.5% cut in discretionary, non-military spending.

• The leader of the Obama administration’s “deficit commission” is pushing zombie lies on social Security’s supposed bankruptcy, and openly talking about how Social Security’s funding has already been spent. From everything I have heard, even from the center-left members of the commission, the final report will recommend cuts to entitlement programs.

• The Obama administration is pushing new line-item veto legislation that would allow for further spending cuts.

It’s actually a bit worse than this. The budget resolution that the House will approve includes $7 billion more in cuts from the President’s own budget request. The education jobs fund expected in the House version of the war supplemental, once $23 billion, has been scaled back to $10 billion, completely offset (the drug industry takes a hit). Republicans plan to vote against the war bill en masse, and you can just see a scenario where the teacher aid must go “because we don’t have the votes.” The line-item veto legislation mentioned above would also rescissions to spending cuts, but not tax subsidies, meaning that it’s designed to eliminate social spending. And on the bill penalizing China for currency manipulation, thought by its sponsors to be a money-free stimulus because of the boost it could give to manufacturing, the White House is discouraging Chuck Schumer from bringing it to the floor, after China announced a very gradual resetting of their currency.

The worst of all of this is the trimming of Medicaid funding for state budgets that already built in the federal help into their budget plans. State cutbacks have been the anti-stimulus to the federal stimulus, offsetting the recovery spending almost completely, and without the Medicaid spending, attached to a jobs bill that now may possibly never pass, states will take the knife and start scalping. As CBPP’s Robert Greenstein notes:

Without the extended Medicaid funding, Pennsylvania plans to cut funding for domestic violence prevention in half, eliminate all state funds for addressing substance abuse and homelessness, cut funding for child welfare by one-quarter, and cut payments to private hospitals, nursing homes, and doctors across the state — among other steps.

It’s terrible that the entire world has been bitten by the austerity bug; it threatens a zero-growth future for up to a decade. But you can’t buy the argument that the White House has been somehow immune.

It feels a lot like 1937.