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团团现在还在看不见尽头的加班中，木有时间好好整格式了，还望大家见谅
【速度】
Why Obama is Resilient to the Weak Economy
By Rana Foroohar | August 23, 2012
【计时1】
One of the most amazing things about this election season is that the weak economy hasn’t been more of a liability for President Obama. Historically, it’s unprecedented. If you look at the Conference Board’s consumer–confidence index, which since its inception in 1967 has perfectly predicted presidential elections, you’ll see that every time the index is below 95, the incumbent loses.
Today’s confidence number is around 66, which is very low by any standard. (When Jimmy Carter lost, it was 74!) Yet the President continues to lead in many polls, even when it comes to the economy. In a Pew poll conducted in July, 48% of voters believed the President would do a better job of improving economic conditions, whereas Mitt Romneyscored just 42%.
Clearly, times have changed since Ronald Reagan was able to topple Carter by simply asking, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” So, why hasn’t the lethargic economy been as much of a headwind for Obama as history would have led us to believe it should be? I’d argue it comes down to three things – first, voters know the global economy has gotten a lot more complicated since 1980, and they don’t expect any one person or policy to solve all our woes—most people know many of the economic troubles of the moment are coming from overseas, and they don’t think things will get better anytime soon, no matter who’s President. Voters seem to be treating Obama’s first term economy as a write off – kind of like Romney’s wife’s horse.
On that note, Mitt Romney’s 13 percent problem, which is part and parcel of his Middle Class problem, isn’t going away. American voters believe across party lines that the shrinking middle is our core economic issue – and they don’t believe Romney has the solution to it. Finally, even rich businessmen know that you need the government to help create jobs – which is why a new FT poll shows more of them support the President. For more on that, and why a bad economy means Obama may still have a future, check out my latest Curious Capitalist column in Time Magazine.
【字数：358】
First Lady Announcing New Hiring Push for Vets
By Associated Press August 22, 2012
【计时2】
WASHINGTON — First lady Michelle Obama is traveling to the electoral battleground of Florida on Wednesday to announce that 2,000 businesses around the country have hired or trained more than 125,000 military veterans and spouses in the past year, exceeding a White House goal of 100,000 by the end of next year.
Buoyed by those numbers, Mrs. Obama planned to announce that the same companies have committed to hire or train an additional 250,000 veterans and military spouses by 2014, the White House said. That includes hiring or training 50,000 military spouses within three years — and helping them keep those jobs as families move from one duty station to another.
“More and more businesses are recognizing that hiring veterans is good for their bottom line, and they are making bold commitments to bring veterans into their ranks,” said Brad Cooper, executive director of the first lady’s Joining Forces effort.
Mrs. Obama planned to announce the new commitments at Naval Station Mayport in Jacksonville. She was to be joined by Vice Adm. Scott Van Buskirk, chief of naval personnel.
In April 2011, the first lady and Jill Biden, wife of the vice president, launched Joining Forces to encourage Americans to support military families and veterans. The White House said the hiring push has helped to reduce unemployment among veterans from 8.6 percent in July 2011 to 6.9 percent last month.
Labor Department statistics show the unemployment rate for veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is at 8.9 percent, above the national rate of 8.3 percent. For veterans under 24, the unemployment rate was 19.9 percent in July.
【字数：267】
Understanding a New Global Economy
By Rana Foroohar | August 9, 2012
【计时3】
As products roll off the line at Caterpillar’s recently expanded East Peoria, Ill., factory, every one is marked with a flag that designates its final destination. There are a lot of Chinese, Indian and Australian flags. But there are plenty of American ones too, and their numbers are growing.
“We put those flags on a few years back. I wanted our workers to understand that globalization isn’t necessarily about someone taking your job,” says Caterpillar CEO Doug Oberhelman, who thinks less about a single world market than many regional ones. The company is global, but where it can, it sources and produces locally, which is a natural hedge against everything from oil prices to currency risk to customer tastes.
The bottom line: jobs and growth are split more or less equally between the U.S. and the rest of the world. That doesn’t mean the pressure is off labor — witness the company’s union squabbles — but it challenges conventional wisdom about the global economy.
Until quite recently, globalization was seen as a one-way street. American companies, which led the charge four decades or so ago into growing global markets, were its ambassadors — and American workers, whose wages and upward mobility were flattened, were the victims. The core idea was that globalization, technological innovation and unfettered free trade would erase historical and geographic boundaries, making the world ever more economically interconnected and alike. (Foreign-affairs writer Tom Friedman famously shorthanded this notion with the title of his book The World Is Flat.)
In this vision, all nations would sit on an even playing field, and the U.S. would come under more and more competitive pressure from eager upstart nations. It worked something like that from the mid-1980s to 2008, a period of unprecedented market calm that economists call the Great Moderation. Not so much anymore.
We’re now in a new age of volatility, with new rules of the road. Bankers will become less important, manufacturers more so. Complex global supply chains will give way to a new kind of regional economic hub. Blue collar jobs will go high tech. Robots will replace Chinese workers. Private companies will become educators. And mayors will be the new economic power players.
【字数：364】
9 Reasons Why This Economy Feels So Bad
By Michael Sivy | August 7, 2012
【计时4】
Recent U.S. economic troubles are often referred to as the Great Recession, implicitly equating them with conditions during the Great Depression. Yet by many measures the economic deterioration of the past few years is not as serious as in some earlier downturns. The drop in GDP from peak to trough for the 2007–09 recession was indeed severe, 4.7% compared with 3.2% for the 1973–75 recession. Still, it doesn’t begin to compare with the 26% decline of the early 1930s, the 18% of the 1937–38 recession or even the 12% of the often-overlooked 1945 slump. And peak unemployment was higher not only during the Great Depression, but also during the recession of the early 1980s.
Moreover, if you look beyond the national averages, several past recessions have been more destructive in certain specific regions. Rust Belt manufacturing was badly battered in the 1970s — indeed, Detroit and the U.S. auto industry have never fully recovered. And the oil and gas business, especially in Texas, needed a long time to bounce back from the 1980s. All things considered, the recent recession may have been worse than average, but it was hardly unprecedented — and nowhere near comparable to what happened in the 1930s. So why do today’s economic troubles seem even worse than they are? Here are nine reasons:
The recovery has been hugely disappointing. Compared with today’s feeble gains, the rebounds that followed the deep recessions of 1973–75 and the early 1980s were robust. Within 18 months, real GDP growth touched 9% and remained well above average for several years. By contrast, the current recovery has failed to get much beyond 4% and has averaged less than 2.25% over the three years since the official end of the recession.
Slow growth doesn’t count for much in a recovery. If the economy is on the brink of recession, maintaining any growth at all keeps unemployment from rising much, which is an achievement if it’s only 5%. But once a bad recession has pushed unemployment above 8%, sluggish growth doesn’t help much. Because the population is continually increasing, it takes 200,000 new jobs a month to bring unemployment down again. Creating 75,000 jobs a month — or even 150,000 — isn’t enough.
【字数：369】
【计时5】
The U.S. was in worse shape than usual when the slump started. In the 1980s, President Reagan was able to rev up the economy with a mixture of tax cuts and defense spending. But when the recent recession started, taxes were already low and the budget had gone from surplus to a large deficit, so it has been harder to stimulate a recovery.
The troubles were concentrated in finance and housing. Recessions that occur because of a downturn in manufacturing are normally followed by a timely recovery. But when the troubles are concentrated in finance, bankers are hesitant to lend the money needed to get the economy moving again. And a drop in housing prices that makes homeowners feel poorer discourages them from spending even after a recovery has started.
The economic pain has been greatest where it hurts most. The biggest wealth decline during the recession — more than 40% — was among middle-class households whose net worth depends more on home equity than on stocks. In addition, rising prices for gasoline and food have a larger impact on households with lower incomes.
People got used to living beyond their means. The middle-class standard of living has been eroding for more than a decade. Many Americans maintained their spending by borrowing against credit cards and also against the rising value of their homes — until they couldn’t anymore. Now they are feeling not just the actual decline in the economy but also the loss of the artificial affluence that came from borrowing.
The statistics understate the extent of unemployment. Millions of people have dropped out of the labor force, either because they are so-called discouraged workers or were forced into early retirement or are working at temporary or part-time jobs. If everyone who wants more work were counted, the unemployment rate would be somewhere between 11% and 15%.
The euro crisis doesn’t help. It’s easier to straighten out your own economy if the countries you trade with are booming and have lots of money to spend buying your exports. It’s also helpful if they aren’t threatening to blow up the global banking system.
U.S. policy is gridlocked and uncertain. The Morning in America boosterism of the Reagan era may not have made government policies work any better, but it did help keep up morale. By contrast, today’s division and gridlock make the objective economic problems seem even more threatening than they actually are. And that may not change, given today’s divisive politics, however the November elections turn out.
【字数：416】
【越障】
The Six Daunting Financial Problems Facing America
By Michael Sivy August 21, 2012
The choice of Paul Ryan as the presumptive Republican candidate for Vice President has ensured that budgetary arithmetic will be a central issue in the election campaign. But it’s important to remember, as the Mock Turtle says in Alice in Wonderland, that arithmetic consists of four basic operations – Ambition, Distraction, Uglification and Derision. Of these, Distraction is likely to be the tactic employed most frequently this election season. The economic problems that America faces are fairly clear, but all the possible solutions are unpalatable. So the candidates will probably try to avoid getting too specific or, alternatively, divert discussions into debates over technicalities. But even where technical questions are important, basic decisions about policy — and values — have to be made first. To see this in practical terms, it’s worth taking a quick look at six of the most daunting financial issues that need to be dealt with.
The National Debt. Federal government debt now stands at 73% of annual GDP, not counting money the government owes to itself, such as the Social Security Trust Fund. If current spending and tax rates (including the Bush tax cuts) are extended, debt will reach 93% within a decade, and will go into the danger zone in 15 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office. In 25 years, it will reach nearly 200%, at which point the Federal debt will be insupportable, unless it is devalued significantly through inflation.
Taxes. Total federal taxes are around 18% of GDP today, roughly what they’ve been since the 1950s. State and local taxes, however, have increased substantially over that period. Total taxes from all sources are now a bit more than 34% of GDP, up from a low of 26% in the mid-1950s, but below highs of more than 36% reached several times in the past 15 years. So by historical standards, total taxes are not especially low. On the other hand, there is room to raise taxes a bit without going into unprecedented territory. To have a substantial impact, however, tax increases would have to fall on the middle class as well as the affluent. Extending the Bush tax cuts for the middle class and allowing taxes to rise to Clinton-era levels only for households with incomes over $250,000 (and singles over $200,000) would raise enough money to cut the deficit by just around 10% over the coming decade.
Social Security. Benefits are paid mostly from current Social Security payroll taxes. The Trust Fund is largely an accounting device of money the government owes to itself. In any event, the Trust Fund will be exhausted in less than 25 years, well before today’s youngest workers retire. Eventually taxes will be sufficient to pay only 75% of the benefits that are currently promised. Either benefits have to be cut, Social Security taxes have to be raised, or the growing gap between the two has to be paid for with revenue from other taxes. By tinkering with various formulas, the 25% gap could be closed without too much pain. But the burden will still have to be spread between more and less affluent people, current and future retirees, and taxpayers in general.
Pension Funds. Everyone knows that many pension funds for public-sector employees are in trouble. The shortfall between the amount that should have been saved to pay for future benefits and the amount that actually has been saved totals hundreds of billions of dollars. But even that is a massively understated figure – the real shortfall is probably more than five times as big, or more than $4 trillion. The reason: Pension funds are greatly overestimating their likely future investment returns. Many funds assume a 7% to 8% compound annual return, when in fact 5% to 6% would be more realistic.
Medicare. The cost of Medicare and Medicaid is projected to rise from 5.4% of GDP to 7.2% in a decade and to at least 9.6% of GDP in 25 years. The Affordable Care Act tries to prevent even faster growth partly by trying to make the American health-care system more efficient. But it also shifts some costs to the states, which will not reduce the total tax burden over the long term. And it reduces payments to doctors and hospitals, which could lead to fewer doctors, longer waiting times or a two-tier system in which people who can pay cash receive significantly better care. Even if the positive aspects of the new health-care law succeed in containing costs as planned, Medicare and Medicaid are projected to consume more than 40% of Federal revenues in 25 years, substantially outpacing the growth of tax receipts even if all of the Bush tax cuts are allowed to expire — including those for the middle class.
Defense. Military spending was more than 10% of GDP in the 1950s and hit a low of 3.7% in 2000 before the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center. Since then, the figure has more than doubled in dollar terms, after adjustment for inflation, and now accounts for more than 5.5% of U.S. GDP. At $900 billion a year, defense is a huge chunk of the Federal budget, and trimming it could lessen the need to raise taxes or cut social programs. But any consequential cuts to the defense budget would require a broad consensus for a significantly paired down U.S. defense mission, and such consensus does not exist right now.
While any of these specific figures can be debated, collectively they make three things clear, in my view. First, America’s biggest challenges are not solely financial – they include the lack of clear objectives that are broadly supported by the electorate. Second, there are powerful political incentives to avoid facing the most fundamental problems – or to evade them with endless debates over minor policy changes. Third, if these problems are not dealt with seriously, the U.S. economy will slide along for a while with below-average growth and above-average unemployment until debt and other financial problems become insupportable. In the end, no amount of denial and evasion can overcome the power of basic arithmetic.
【字数：1007】
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发表于 2012-8-23 23:42:12
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不会写笔记呀，耗时了
