Passage 2 How to Pay for a Jobs Bill
政府经济刺激政策之我见 《经济学人》

[00:00]Christina Rmoer famously argued that the administration's proposed stimulus
[00:07]should be about $1.2 trillion in size, only to have the eventual number
[00:16]chosen by non-economist Rahm Emanuel. Time and again, crisis policy
[00:24]and economic policy in this recession have been shaped as much
[00:30]or more by politics as by economics.
[00:35]Things are unlikely to be much different now. One might choose any number of
[00:41]methods for determining how much should be spent on new jobs programmes.
[00:47]Additional modeling could be done,
[00:51]or the administration could simply decide to make up the gap between
[00:57]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.