转载纽约时报的"The Bottom Line on Obamanomics"

By David Leonhardt

As Senator Barack Obama prepares to accept the Democratic nomination Thursday, it is clear that the economic policies of the next U.S. president are going to be hugely important. Ever since Wall Street bankers were called back from their vacations last summer to deal with the convulsions in the mortgage market, the economy has been lurching from one crisis to the next. The International Monetary Fund has described the situation as the largest financial shock since the Great Depression. In some fundamental ways, the American economy has stopped working.

The fact that the economy grows - that it produces more goods and services one year than it did in the previous one - no longer ensures that most families will benefit from its growth. For the first time on record, an economic expansion seems to have ended without family income having risen substantially. In fact, most families are making less, after accounting for inflation, than they were in 2000.

Americans have still been buying such things, but they have been doing so with debt. A big chunk of that debt will never be repaid, which is the most basic explanation for the financial crisis. Even after the crisis has passed, the larger problem of income stagnation will remain.

It is hardly the economy\'s only serious problem either. There is also the slow unraveling of the employer-based health-insurance system and the fact that, come 2011, the baby boomers will start to turn 65, setting off an enormous rise in the government\'s Medicare and Social Security obligations. Americans seem to realize that something has gone wrong. In recent polls, about 80 percent of respondents say the economy is in bad shape, and almost 70 percent say it is going to get worse.

Senator John McCain\'s economic vision, as he has laid it out during the presidential campaign, amounts to a slightly altered version of Republican orthodoxy, with tax cuts at the core. Obama, on the other hand, has more-detailed proposals but a less obvious ideology.

A few weeks ago, I joined Obama on a flight from Orlando, Florida, to Chicago and began our conversation by asking about his economic approach. He started to answer, but then interrupted himself. My core economic theory is pragmatism, he said, figuring out what works.

To understand where Obama stands, you first have to know that, for 15 years, Democratic Party economics have been defined by a struggle that took place during the start of the Clinton administration. It was the battle of the Bobs.

On one side was Clinton\'s labor secretary and longtime friend, Bob Reich, who argued that the government should invest in roads, worker training and the like to stimulate the economy and help the middle class. On the other side was Bob Rubin, a former Goldman Sachs executive turned White House aide, who favored reducing the deficit to soothe the bond market, bring down interest rates and get the economy moving again. Clinton cast his lot with Rubin, and to this day the first question about any Democrat\'s economic outlook is often where his heart lies, with Reich or Rubin, the left or the center, the government or the market.

Among the policy experts and economists who make up the Democratic government-in-waiting, there is now something of a consensus. They agree that deficit reduction did an enormous amount of good. It helped usher in the 1990s boom and the only period of strong, broad-based income growth in a generation. But that boom also depended on a technology bubble and historically low oil prices. In the current decade, the U.S. economy has continued to grow at a decent pace, but the benefits have flowed mostly to a small slice of workers at the very top of the income distribution. From today\'s vantage point, inequality looks likes a bigger problem than economic growth; fiscal discipline seems necessary but not sufficient.

The new consensus means that the policies of an Obama administration would differ from those of the Clinton administration. Obama\'s agenda starts not with raising taxes to reduce the deficit, as Clinton\'s ended up doing, but with changing the tax code so that families making more than $250,000 a year pay more taxes and nearly everyone else pays less. That would begin to address inequality. Then there would be Reich-like investments in alternative energy, physical infrastructure and such, meant both to create middle-class jobs and to address long-term problems like global warming.

All of this raises the question of what will happen to the deficit. Obama\'s aides optimistically insist he will reduce it, thanks to his tax increases on the affluent and his plan to wind down the Iraq war. Relative to McCain, whose promised spending cuts are extremely vague, Obama looks like a fiscal conservative.

A controversial version of Obama\'s market friendliness came from his health care proposal, which, unlike Hillary Rodham Clinton\'s, would not mandate that people have health insurance. Like other Democrats, he was pushing for a big government program to deal with what he saw as market failures in health care and to bring down the price of insurance. Once the program was in place, though, he trusted a market of individuals to make its own decisions; once the government had subsidized health insurance, he thought the vast majority of the uninsured would sign up.

The market is the best mechanism ever invented for efficiently allocating resources to maximize production, Obama told me. And I also think that there is a connection between the freedom of the marketplace and freedom more generally. But, he continued, there are certain things the market doesn\'t automatically do.

The most tangible way that today\'s economy feels unfair is the lack of real income growth for most families. Earlier this year, when I interviewed Obama during the primaries, he was careful to say that he didn\'t think President George W. Bush deserved all that much blame for the stagnant incomes of the current decade. Income growth for most families began to slow in the 1970s, and the causes of the great pay slowdown were complex. Obama didn\'t name them all, but a decent list would look something like this: new technologies that have made some blue-collar work obsolete; a slowing in American educational attainment; the shriveling of labor unions; the increase in one-parent families, which are far less economically secure; and the rise of other countries that have huge low-wage work forces.

What Obama blamed the current administration for, he said, was aggravating these trends with the tax code. To a large extent, Obama\'s economic agenda revolves around reversing Bush\'s tax policies and then going a bit further in the other direction. Here Obama stands on the left side of the Democratic Party, but not exactly in the traditional tax-and-spend ways.

The Tax Policy Center, a research group run by the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute, has done the most detailed analysis of the Obama and McCain tax plans, and it has published a series of fascinating tables. For the bottom 80 percent of the population - those households making $118,000 or less - McCain\'s various tax cuts would mean a net savings of about $200 a year on average, in 2012. Obama\'s proposals would bring $900 a year in savings that year. So for most people, Obama is the tax cutter in this campaign.

He would then pay for the cuts, at least in part, by raising taxes on the affluent to a point where they would eventually be slightly higher than they were under Clinton. For these upper-income families, the Tax Policy Center\'s comparisons with McCain are even starker. McCain would cut taxes for the top 0.1 percent of earners - those making an average of $9.1 million - by another $190,000 a year, on top of the Bush reductions. Obama would raise taxes on this top 0.1 percent by an average of $800,000 a year.

Since the mid-1990s, the top earning families\' inflation-adjusted pretax income has roughly doubled. The same would be true of households making a few hundred thousand dollars a year.

Bill Clinton raised taxes on upper-income families in 1993 and then presided over the longest economic expansion on record. His successor, Bush, then did exactly what the supply-siders wanted, cutting upper-income tax rates, and the results were much worse.

At a meeting with economists last summer, Obama said he agreed that blue-collar workers were struggling primarily because their skills weren\'t as much in demand as they used to be. Technology has remade the economy, and education and retraining were the best ways for workers to keep up.

But any public policy response couldn\'t be about just education; it also had to take account of the psychology of the workplace, he continued. Some laid-off steelworkers might indeed be able to go back to school to become health-care workers. But many of them don\'t want to work in health care or any service job. Factory workers, he said, want to make something.

Since the dawn of the Age of Reagan, the idea that government spending can be a good thing for the economy has been out of favor, even among Democrats. But Obama\'s agenda calls for about $50 billion in new annual spending on various investments, including infrastructure, alternative energy and scientific research.

These investments might pay off in all sorts of ways. They are a classic form of stimulus that could help the economy emerge from the housing hangover. They would provide jobs for former factory workers and others without college degrees. Above all, the investments would have the potential to pay big long-term dividends, in the form of a national economy that operated more smoothly.

The trick is figuring out which investments to make. The U.S. government has made its share of mistakes in this area, a recent example being subsidies for ethanol, which Obama, a farm-state senator, has championed and McCain has opposed. But Obama at least seems to have learned one lesson from the experience: His proposed new infrastructure spending would be overseen by a bipartisan board of unelected officials, rather than members of Congress.

During the flight, I asked Obama whether he thought he had been able to tell an effective story about the economy during this campaign. Specifically, I wondered, did he think he had a message that compared with Reagan\'s simple call for less government and lower taxes. He paused for a few seconds and then said this:

I think I can tell a pretty simple story. Ronald Reagan ushered in an era that reasserted the marketplace and freedom. He made people aware of the cost involved of government regulation or at least a command-and-control-style regulation regime. Bill Clinton to some extent continued that pattern, although he may have smoothed out the edges of it. And George Bush took Ronald Reagan\'s insight and ran it over a cliff.

And so I think the simple way of telling the story is that when Bill Clinton said the era of big government is over, he wasn\'t arguing for an era of no government. So what we need to bring about is the end of the era of unresponsive and inefficient government and short-term thinking in government, so that the government is laying the groundwork, the framework, the foundation for the market to operate effectively and for every single individual to be able to be connected with that market and to succeed in that market. And it\'s now a global marketplace.

Now, that\'s the story. Now, telling it elegantly - \'low taxes, smaller government\' - the way the Republicans have, I think is more of a challenge.

Even if Obama does figure out how to meet the challenge well enough to get elected, there are any number of ways in which his plans could fail. He has never run any government entity - no state, no city, not even a municipal agency - and he may not prove to be good at doing so. The economy could deteriorate further, leaving him with a Clinton-like choice between manageable deficits and direct help for the middle class. Or maybe the many economists who like his agenda are simply wrong.

For Democrats who want to think the worst about their opponents, McCain\'s reliance on Republican orthodoxy may be affirming. But it is really a shame. For for the time being, only one party is applying the lessons of history to the country\'s biggest economic problems. There is no great battle of new ideas, and that can\'t make it more likely that those problems will be solved.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/08/22/business/WBobama23.php