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

[00:00]Questions are being raised as to whether the policy of jump starting
[00:05]the economy through a massive fiscal stimulus has failed.
[00:10]Has Keynesian economics been proven wrong now that it has been put to the test?
[00:17]That question, however, would make sense
[00:20]only if Keynesian economics had really been tried. Indeed,
[00:26]what is needed now is another dose of fiscal stimulus. If that does not happen,
[00:32]we can look forward to an even longer period
[00:36]in which the economy operates below capacity, with high unemployment.
[00:43]The Obama administration seems surprised and disappointed with high joblessness.
[00:50]It should not be. All of this was predictable.
[00:55]The true measure of the success of the stimulus
[00:59]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.