一本教会你“做对”题的6级阅读书 day14 passage2
Passage 2 How to Pay for a Jobs Bill
政府经济刺激政策之我见 《经济学人》
Christina Rmoer famously argued that the administration's proposed stimulus
should be about $1.2 trillion in size, only to have the eventual number
chosen by non-economist Rahm Emanuel. Time and again, crisis policy
and economic policy in this recession have been shaped as much
or more by politics as by economics.
Things are unlikely to be much different now. One might choose any number of
methods for determining how much should be spent on new jobs programmes.
Additional modeling could be done,
or the administration could simply decide to make up the gap between
what was passed last spring and what Ms Romer initially recommended.
[01:03]Or one could just use whatever one finds lying around. In his speech,
[01:10]Mr Obama noted:
[01:13]Given the challenge of speeding the pace of hiring in the private sector,
[01:19]these targeted initiatives are right and they are needed.
[01:24]But with a fiscal crisis to match our economic crisis,
[01:29]we also must be prudent about how we fund it.
[01:34]So to help support these efforts,
[01:37]we're going to wind down the Troubled Asset Relief Program,
[01:42]or TARP-the fund created to stabilize the financial system
[01:48]so banks would lend again.
[01:51]There has rarely been a less loved
[01:54]or more necessary emergency program than TARP,
[01:59]which indisputably helped prevent a collapse of the entire financial system.
[02:06]Launched hastily under the last administration, the TARP program was flawed,
[02:13]and we have worked hard to correct those flaws and manage it properly.
[02:19]And today, TARP has served its original purpose
[02:24]and at a much lower cost than we expected.
[02:29]In fact, because of our stewardship of this program,
[02:34]and the transparency and accountability we put in place,
[02:39]TARP is expected to cost the taxpayer at least $200 billion
[02:45]less than what was expected just this summer. And the assistance to banks,
[02:52]once thought to cost taxpayers untold billions,
[02:56]is on track to actually reap billions in profit for the taxpaying public.
[03:03]This gives us a chance to pay down the deficit faster
[03:08]than we thought possible and to shift funds
[03:12]that would have gone to help the banks on Wall Street
[03:16]to help create jobs on Main Street.
[03:19]Speaking on background before the speech,
[03:22]senior administration officials mentioned multiple times
[03:27]that the $200 billion in unspent TARP money gave them the fiscal room
[03:34]to pursue these new programmes. No other source of funding,
[03:40]including deficit spending, was acknowledged.
[03:44]Now, that doesn't mean
[03:47]that the final bill won't be larger than $200 billion;
[03:53]Mr Obama's proposals will be pinched and finalised by the Congress,
[03:59]which may choose to add to the bill's size.
[04:03]And I don't think that the administration actually believes
[04:08]that it's crucial to stay within this $200 billion,
[04:13]for the sake of the deficit.
[04:15]That money is almost meaningless where the deficit is concerned,
[04:21]and actually reining in the deficit will require hard choices
[04:25]to be made about tax revenues and defence and entitlement spending.
[04:32]A stimulative one-off is basically irrelevant.