On the continent, the slashed government budgets in the wake of the global meltdown have proved hugely unpopular — the French and Greek votes over the weekend are widely interpreted as rejections of the strategy of cinching debt to lower interest rates and lay the foundation for stronger economies. And those plans haven’t worked, at least so far: The cuts have choked off economic growth, trapping entire nations in a vicious downturn that looks increasingly difficult to escape.

Austerity has even become politically toxic in relatively healthy economies. Unemployment in Germany is 7 percent — the lowest rate in 20 years — but the coalition led by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, a leading proponent of austerity, lost its majority in one of the country’s northern states after a vote Sunday.

Britain slumped into recession at the start of this year. Unemployment in Spain climbed to an astronomic 24.4 percent while the interest rate on its bonds has jumped nearly 1 percentage point since March to just under 6 percent. Greece — after a 20 percent reduction in its minimum wage, among other policy changes — is embroiled in chaos.

The debate in the United States is over which lessons to draw from European austerity.

Democratic economists like Robert Reich, the former labor secretary, say the United States will suffer through an economic reversal similar to Europe’s because of automatic spending reductions and expiring tax cuts at the start of next year.

With interest rates at about 1.9 percent for a 10-year Treasury bond, they argue, it’s still historically affordable to borrow money that can be used to keep stimulating what has been a weak recovery. Deficits should be lowered only when the economy is again booming.

House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) counters that the government needs to start limiting its deficits to avoid Europe’s predicament, saying there is an eventual price to be paid for racking up continued yearly shortfalls of more than $1 trillion. Bond traders could easily turn on America the more unsustainable the debt becomes, causing the low interest rates to rise dangerously.

“Everybody wants to think that we’re selling austerity and pain — quite the opposite,” Ryan told Forbes in a video interview last month. “If you keep running up the tab, borrowing way beyond our means and having these massive tax increases, which will shut down economic growth in this country, then you fall into the European austerity mode where you have no choice but to please the bond markets.”

Some economists fear that Europe’s austerity problems have already broken out in the United States.

“We have something similar going on with the state and local governments,” said Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the progressive Center for Economic and Policy Research. “It’s serious, and it’s causing damage.”

Because state and local governments lack the debt capacity of the federal government, they’ve gone into budgetary survival mode and shed 622,000 jobs since the start of Barack Obama’s presidency. Their finances have been a drag on the economy, with Alan Krueger, chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, recently noting that the gross domestic product has been “weighed down by reduced spending in the government sector.”

But others say America and Europe are radically different economies, so it’s better not to read too much into what’s happening along the English Channel and the Mediterranean Sea.

For starters, European countries generally have a larger social safety net than the United States. Both taxes and government spending are a greater share of GDP, so the impact of austerity is greater.

And the 17 nations in the eurozone have a shared currency, but each determine their own budgets and labor markets. The United States, by contrast, has a common monetary and fiscal policy.

When talking about the potential impacts of deficit spending versus austerity, it’s more valuable to base conclusions on the U.S. federal budget instead of the Greek one, said Clay Lowery, former assistant Treasury secretary for international affairs under President George W. Bush who is now vice president of Rock Creek Global Advisors.

“We have to think about our own situation; we need to be careful in our comparisons,” Lowery said. “They have a union that, in some respects, is not a real union.”

That’s a key structural difference, even if U.S. leaders still face a similar no-win choice as their European peers: keep the economy afloat with massive deficits, and eventually, the debt sinks the entire nation or trim budgets to prevent that debt bomb, and the government-driven engine of growth becomes idle.

“You get into this Catch-22,” said Martin Baily, a former top economic adviser for President Bill Clinton who is now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “You’re in this situation where you’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t.”

“I do get queasy about it because we’re in territory we haven’t been in,” Baily said. “The simple truth is you don’t know where the edge of the cliff is, so one has to be cautious about approaching it.”