一本教会你“做对”题的6级阅读书 day13 passage4

Passage 4 American Fiscal Stimulus
美国的财政刺激政策 《商务周刊》

Questions are being raised as to whether the policy of jump starting
the economy through a massive fiscal stimulus has failed.
Has Keynesian economics been proven wrong now that it has been put to the test?
That question, however, would make sense
only if Keynesian economics had really been tried. Indeed,
what is needed now is another dose of fiscal stimulus. If that does not happen,
we can look forward to an even longer period
in which the economy operates below capacity, with high unemployment.
The Obama administration seems surprised and disappointed with high joblessness.
It should not be. All of this was predictable.
The true measure of the success of the stimulus
is not the actual level of unemployment,
[01:02]but what unemployment would have been without the stimulus.
[01:07]The Obama administration was always clear
[01:11]that it would create some three million jobs more than
[01:16]what would otherwise be the case.
[01:19]The problem is that the shock to the economy from the financial crisis was
[01:24]so bad that even Obama's seemingly huge fiscal stimulus has not been enough.
[01:32]But there is another problem. In the United States,
[01:37]only about a quarter of the almost $800bn stimulus
[01:43]was designed to be spent this year,
[01:46]and getting it spent even on "shovel ready" projects has been slow going.
[01:53]Meanwhile, US states have been faced with massive revenue shortfalls,
[02:00]exceeding $200bn. Most face constitutional requirements to run balanced budgets,
[02:09]which means that such states are now either raising taxes
[02:14]or cutting expenditures a negative stimulus
[02:17]that offsets at least some of the federal government's positive stimulus.
[02:24]At the same time, almost one-third of the stimulus was devoted to tax cuts,
[02:32]which Keynesian economics correctly predicted would be relatively ineffective.
[02:39]Households, burdened with debt while their retirement savings wither
[02:44]and job prospects remain dim, have spent only a fraction of the tax cuts.
[02:51]In the US and elsewhere,
[02:54]much attention was focused on fixing the banking system.
[02:59]This may be necessary to restore robust growth,
[03:04]but it is not sufficient. Banks will not lend
[03:08]if the economy is in the doldrums,
[03:11]and American households will be particularly reluctant to borrow
[03:17]at least in the profligate ways they borrowed prior to the crisis.
[03:22]The almighty American consumer was the engine of global growth,
[03:27]but it will most likely continue to sputter even after the banks are repaired.
[03:34]In the interim, some form of government stimulus will be required.
[03:40]Some worry about America's increasing national debt.
[03:44]But if a new stimulus is well designed, with much of the money spent on assets,
[03:51]the fiscal position and future growth can actually be made stronger.