Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti’s approval rating has halved since November, with polls now showing one in five Italian voters firmly aligned with comedian Beppe Grillo’s (think: President Franken) Five-Star party.  While pundits blame higher taxes and labor reform for restaging the recession as a tragicomedy, the real animus lies betwixt the Holy See and the football pitch.

Vatican bank president Ettore Tedeshi’s disclosure last week of Sopranos-like corruption (read: overpaying contractors) served to substantiate recent claims of simony by the pope’s butler, Paolo Gabriele.  At the same time, journalist Gianluigi Nuzzi published his second book detailing the sordid inner workings of the papacy.  Predictably, all three were publically vilified, which is downright baffling over here in America where the Church, having doled out over $3 billion to victims of molestation, occupies a much less lofty perch.   Granted, our distain for authority is wholly connate (see: 1776); forty years after Watergate we still think of priests and politicians as little more than rapists and crooks.  While Mr. Monti may be neither, he surely didn’t benefit from the arrest of 19 players and coaches in connection with a match-rigging scheme in the nation’s professional soccer leagues. Among the high-profile suspects were Lazio midfielder Stefano Mauri and national team defender Domenico Criscito, who was scratched from the Italian roster only days before the onset of Euro 2012.  Not surprisingly, the players to a man took the Lance Armstrong route and steadfastly professed their innocence.

Could Criscito’s inculpation tarnish the U.S. side’s highly unexpected (imagine, for example, the L.A. Kings winning the Stanley Cup) February victory in Genoa?   I’d prefer to think the nexus rather tenuous, as is, hopefully, our reliance on the Eurozone for economic growth.  Given that only 2.1% of U.S. GDP is comprised of trade with the Continent, the doomsday headlines plastering El País and Bildneedn’t impel Americans to transmutate their 401(k) accounts into silver coins or Mormon survival kits. Though the colonies should suffer but a glancing blow, the Euro may, in fact, have already gone terminal.

Portugal’s public debt is about to eclipse GDP, Spain is buried under mountains of toxic bank loans and, despite any measurable debt overhang, the U.K.  has managed to tumble back into recession. With half of ECM countries experiencing negative growth, the Ukraine abandoned prospective memberships in NATO and the EU, and reestablished itself as a Russian satellite. The good news, if you could call it that, is S&P’s steadfast opinion that “other sovereigns would be unlikely to follow any Greek exit” from the common currency.   Then again, this is the very rating agency that completely missed the second largest financial meltdown in U.S. history.

The takeaway, nonetheless, it that Angela Merkel’s insistence on following the breadcrumb trail of austerity as a way out of the woods has been soundly rejected by Europeans.  The evidence is irrefutable now that it was cutbacks in government spending that toppled the nascent economic recovery.  Advocates of Merkel’s policies haven’t fared too well either: witness the drubbing her party took in regional elections, the collapse of the Greek government and the resignation of Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte.   As Socialist François Hollande swiftly crowed after defeating the penurious Nicolas Sarkozy, “austerity can no longer be inevitable.”

At home, austerity vexingly remained, until like yesterday, a centerpiece of the Republican mantra.  And the spineless Obama administration obligingly danced to the music.  While the recovery has produced over 3 million private-sector jobs, 600,000 government employees have been given the axe.  (Based on past recoveries, one could have expected a gain of 1.4 million public-sector jobs.)  Why, even the president’s security detail got in on the act; after refusing to pay an $800 extort to a score of Colombian hookers, Secret Service agents took to the hallway and heroically fought off a wanton condom surcharge.  Admittedly, the sexcapade was never going to be the revenue-generating endeavor orchestrated by an Oregon woman who won a $900,000 jury verdict after contracting herpes from her eHarmony counterpart, but still, a penny saved…

As any economist worth his value as fertilizer will tell you, it is the ratio of debt (or, alternatively, interest payments) to GDP that remains critical in these fallow times.  It would be preferable, therefore, to maintain (or even increase) current government spending while effecting a long-term structural reduction in liabilities.  Clearly, the government must lower its debt burden, but even Mitt Romney seems to understand that stifling growth would be counterproductive: “I don’t want to have us go into a recession in order to balance the budget.”

In this new zeitgeist, it has become de rigueur for politicians to eschew austerity: “Our imperative,” declared G8 leaders at the recent Camp David Summit, “is to promote growth and jobs.” Congressman Paul Ryan (R-WI), whose draconian proposals would turn everyone save the Koch brothers into street urchins, borrowed Clinton’s pretzel logic when he avowed, “the whole premise of our budget is to pre-empt austerity.”

How then to explain Governor Scott Walker’s recall victory?   Were Wisconsin voters astute enough to discern that pension reform offered a long-term fiscal solution that wouldn’t cost jobs today?  Doubtful.  More likely is that the heinousCitizens United ruling paved the way for Walker out spend his opponent seven to one.   Given that it will take decades for the Supreme Court to overturn itself, perhaps we could tax political contributions and use the proceeds to plug the deficit.