With governments across the continent slashing their budgets, unemployment in the 17-nation euro zone hit 10.9 percent in March, its highest level since the euro was first minted in 1999. Eleven European countries — including a couple that are not in the euro zone but have nonetheless inflicted austerity on themselves, such as Britain — are officially in recession.

Making our loopy tax code more equitable appears to be off the agenda, what with Senate Republicans’ refusal Monday to allow a vote on a tax hike for millionaires. And even if the “Buffett Rule” were enacted, it would do nothing to alter the rocketing inequality in Americans’ pre-tax income. With the Southern wage for manufacturing — roughly $14 an hour — becoming the national norm, and with hiring more prevalent for low-wage restaurant and retail jobs than for positions in higher-paid industries, the incomes of most Americans will continue to stagnate, if not decline.

Many of the reasons are widely known: Rebounding from a financial crisis takes an excruciatingly long time; the huge decline in housing values has reduced Americans’ purchasing power; large corporations are making do with fewer employees — at least, in this country.

Ironically, the founding document of a genuinely pan-European politics isn’t one that unites the continent. To the contrary, the fiscal compact that German Chancellor Angela Merkel persuaded her European Union colleagues to embrace — with an assist from French President Nicolas Sarkozy — has given rise to bitter dissents both within and among European nations. The pact, which codifies fiscal constraints that will inflict years of economic stagnation, if not accelerated decline, on such debtor nations as Spain and Greece, has divided Europe into rival camps — the Keynesian leftists against the austerity rightists.

For Republicans, being anti-communist didn’t merely mean opposition to the Soviets and their ideology. That kind of anti-communism was all but universal in the United States, from the Republican right to the small, democratic socialist left (and encompassing European socialists as well). For the 45 years after World War II, however, anti-communism was also the Republicans’ ultimate wedge issue in U.S. politics.

With attacks on Mitt Romney’s career as a venture capitalist coming fast and furious from his primary opponents, the Republican presidential campaigns have entered strange new territory for the GOP: economic reality, or, more precisely, the economy that most people experience.

Confronted with looming catastrophe in Greece, Italy and Spain, European leaders convened but accomplished nothing of relevance. They signed a pact that penalizes E.U. nations if their budget deficits exceed 3 percent of their gross domestic product. But the pact fails to address what these nations are supposed to do if interest rates skyrocket when they roll over billions of euros’ worth of bonds in the coming weeks. The European Central Bank has declared it won’t ride to the rescue by issuing euro-bonds that would federalize European public debt — the only plausible solution to Europe’s impending smash-up.

It’s Europe where democracy is in headlong retreat. There, the leaders of the continent’s largest nations — German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy — have asked their fellow European leaders to relinquish control of their national budgets to unelected European Union technocrats and judges. Any nation whose budget deficit exceeds 3 percent of its gross domestic product will face (as yet unspecified) financial sanctions, which can be suspended only by a supermajority of other E.U. member nations’ leaders.

To the American ear, these questions sound bizarre. Capitalism and democracy are bound together like Siamese twins, are they not? That was our mantra during the Cold War, when it was abundantly clear that communism and democracy were incompatible. After the Cold War ended, though, things grew murkier. Recall that virtually every U.S. chief executive and every U.S. president (two Bushes and one Clinton, in particular) told us that bringing capitalism to China would democratize China.

The outpouring of grief over the death of Steve Jobs has raised the presumably redemptive power of innovation to understandable, if unsustainable, heights among many within the commentariat (and many outside it). But innovation alone won’t reverse our economic decline. Indeed, without U.S. manufacturing, we’re likely to lose U.S. innovation too.

Now what?

The pols are in no position to enact any further left-populist reforms — laws that create, say, a financial transaction tax, or that make it easier for employees to form unions — so long as Republicans control the House and have veto power in the Senate. For that matter, the Democrats couldn’t even get those bills enacted when they controlled both houses of Congress. So what, besides affirming their solidarity with the demonstrators, can they do?

The first part of the strategy has been unfolding for months. Since the 2010 elections brought Republicans to power in numerous swing states, officials in many of those states have made it harder for minority, poor and young voters to cast their ballots. GOP governments have been curtailing early voting (in Ohio and Florida) and requiring voters to produce official photo-identification cards (in Wisconsin). In South Carolina, the poll tax lives again: Voters who want an official photo-ID card must present a passport or a birth certificate, neither of which can be obtained for free.

Good that you’re taking your bus trip through the Midwest, but you should probably can your usual August escape to Martha’s Vineyard if the economy continues to crumble. I know you need a break, but you’re headed toward a long break starting Jan. 20, 2013, unless you change course.

Angelenos have focused their ire and attention over the past week on the Bostonian among them and the unspeakable acts he’s committed.

Not Whitey Bulger, whose alleged unspeakable acts happened long ago and far away from his Santa Monica hideaway. I refer, rather, to Frank McCourt, owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers, who, since he arrived from Boston to take ownership of the club in 2004, has driven it into the ground and, on Monday, into bankruptcy.

To begin, then: We’re broke! We can’t afford any more taxes! (Well, America’s 400 wealthiest taxpayers certainly can. In 1955, according to the Campaign for America’s Future, the country’s 400 wealthiest taxpayers had an average income of $13.3 million (in 2008 dollars) and paid 51.2 percent of that in federal income taxes. In 2008, according to IRS calculations, they had an average income of $270.5 million and paid 18 percent of that in federal income taxes. And in 1955, by the way, we could afford to pave roads.)

The inexhaustible labor pool that has fueled China’s rise as the world’s dominant low-cost manufacturer is beginning to get exhausted. The nation’s decades-old one-child policy has collided with its decades-old industrial development policy to produce something hitherto unimaginable: a labor shortage. China’s labor force will begin to shrink in the next year or two, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday.

Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour’s announcement Monday that he will not seek the presidency is just the latest sign that politically sentient Republicans fear their party’s voters have moved so deeply into la-la land that winning their support in next year’s primaries could render their nominee unelectable in November. “Friends of Barbour,” reports The Post’s Dan Balz, “said that he had come to the conclusion that Republicans can win only if they are totally focused on serious issues and not distracted by some side issues, such as Obama’s birthplace, that have arisen in the early going.”