译者 ringohan
Bombs, Bridges and Jobs
炸弹、桥梁及就业
By PAUL KRUGMAN
保罗·克鲁格曼
A few years back Representative Barney Frank coined an apt phrase for many of his colleagues: weaponized Keynesians, defined as those who believe “that the government does not create jobs when it funds the building of bridges or important research or retrains workers, but when it builds airplanes that are never going to be used in combat, that is of course economic salvation.”
几年以前，巴尔尼·弗兰克众议员为他的同事发明了一个十分贴切的词汇：武装凯恩斯主义者，指那些认为“政府为建造桥梁或者重要的研究项目提供资金，或者对工人重新培训，并不会创造就业。但是，政府建造永远不会在战场中使用的飞机，这样做理所当然是拯救经济的措施。”
Right now the weaponized Keynesians are out in full force — which makes this a good time to see what’s really going on in debates over economic policy.
现在，武装凯恩斯主义者全体出动——不过，这种情况反倒成了一个观察经济政策辩论真实动向的良好时机。
What’s bringing out the military big spenders is the approaching deadline for the so-called supercommittee to agree on a plan for deficit reduction. If no agreement is reached, this failure is supposed to trigger cuts in the defense budget.
目前引出国防方面巨额支出项目的是由是，所谓的超级预算委员规定必须达成财政赤字削减计划的日期很快就要截止了。如果达不成协议，就应该启动削减国防预算方面的程序。
Faced with this prospect, Republicans — who normally insist that the government can’t eate jobs, and who have argued that lower, not higher, federal spending is the key to recovery — have rushed to oppose any cuts in military spending. Why? Because, they say, such cuts would destroy jobs.
面对着这样的前景，共和党人——那些通常坚持认为政府不能创造就业岗位，认为减少而不是提高联邦开支是经济复苏的关键措施的人——急急忙忙出来反对对国防预算进行任何削减。为什么？因为他们说了这种削减会破坏就业岗位。
Thus Representative Buck McKeon, Republican of California, once attacked the Obama stimulus plan because “more spending is not what California or this country needs.” But two weeks ago, writing in The Wall Street Journal, Mr. McKeon — now the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee — warned that the defense cuts that are scheduled to take place if the supercommittee fails to agree would eliminate jobs and raise the unemployment rate.
加州共和党人、众议员巴克·麦凯恩曾经攻击奥巴马经济刺激计划，认为更多开支并不是加州或这个国家需要的东西。但是，两周以前，《华尔街日报》的一篇文章写道，现在担任众议院军事委员会主席的麦凯恩先生警告说，超级预算委员会无法达成协议情况下计划发生的国防费用削减，将消除工作岗位，提高失业率。
Oh, the hypocrisy! But what makes this particular form of hypocrisy so enduring?
哦，虚伪！然而，是什么东西让这种特殊形式的虚伪如此长久？
First things first: Military spending does create jobs when the economy is depressed. Indeed, much of the evidence that Keynesian economics works comes from tracking the effects of past military buildups. Some liberals dislike this conclusion, but economics isn’t a morality play: spending on things you don’t like is still spending, and more spending would create more jobs.
首先，经济衰退期间军事开支的确会创造就业岗位。实际上，凯恩斯经济学起作用的大部分证据来自跟踪研究过去军事设施建设的效果。有些自由主义者不喜欢这个结论，但是经济并不是一场道德剧：在自己不喜欢的方面开支依然是一种开支，更多的开支就会创造更多的工作岗位。
But why would anyone prefer spending on destruction to spending on construction, prefer building weapons to building bridges?
但是，为什么还有人喜欢在破坏方面开支，却不喜欢在建设方面开支？喜欢建造武器而不喜欢建设桥梁？
John Maynard Keynes himself offered a partial answer 75 years ago, when he noted a curious “preference for wholly ‘wasteful’ forms of loan expenditure rather than for partly wasteful forms, which, because they are not wholly wasteful, tend to be judged on strict ‘business’ principles.” Indeed. Spend money on some useful goal, like the promotion of new energy sources, and people start screaming, “Solyndra! Waste!” Spend money on a weapons system we don’t need, and those voices are silent, because nobody expects F-22s to be a good business proposition.
75年前，约翰·梅纳德·凯恩斯本人就对这个问题提出了部分答案，他注意到人们存在一种对整体浪费型贷款开支项目的喜好，而不喜好部分浪费性开支项目，原因是后者并非整体浪费型项目，往往需要以严格的“商业原则”来加以衡量。真的如此，在诸如推广新能源等一些有用的目标上开支，人们就开始喊叫，“又一个Solyndra项目!浪费！”而在我们并不需要的武器系统上开支，就没有了反对的声音，原因是没有人期待F-22会成为一个好的商业机会。
To deal with this preference, Keynes whimsically suggested burying bottles full of cash in disused mines and letting the private sector dig them back up. In the same vein, I recently suggested that a fake threat of alien invasion, requiring vast anti-alien spending, might be just the thing to get the economy moving again.
为了对付这种喜好，凯恩斯曾经异想天开地建议将装满现金的瓶子埋在废弃的矿井里，让私营部分将他们重新挖出来。按照同样的思路，最近我建议，经济重新启动可能需要一种假想的外敌入侵，这样，就需要为抗击外敌的进行大规模支出。
But there are also darker motives behind weaponized Keynesianism.
然而，在武装凯恩斯主义的背后也存在更加黑暗的动机。
For one thing, to admit that public spending on useful projects can create jobs is to admit that such spending can in fact do good, that sometimes government is the solution, not the problem. Fear that voters might reach the same conclusion is, I’d argue, the main reason the right has always seen Keynesian economics as a leftist doctrine, when it’s actually nothing of the sort. However, spending on useless or, even better, destructive projects doesn’t present conservatives with the same problem.
一方面，承认在有用的项目上的公共开支可以创造就业机会，就是承认这种支出其实上是有好处的，承认有时候政府是一种解决方案，而不是问题。我可以说，害怕选民会得出相同的结论是右翼人士一直将凯恩斯主义视为左翼学说的主要理由，而凯恩斯主义实际上根本不是他们所说的。不过，在无用的项目，或者最好是在破坏性的项目上开支，并不会给保守派提出同样的问题。
Beyond that, there’s a point made long ago by the Polish economist Michael Kalecki: to admit that the government can create jobs is to reduce the perceived importance of business confidence.
除此之外，还有很久以前波兰经济学家迈克尔 卡莱茨基提出的观点，即承认政府可以创造就业机会就是降低人们所感知觉的商业信心的重要性。
Appeals to confidence have always been a key debating point for opponents of taxes and regulation; Wall Street’s whining about President Obama is part of a long tradition in which wealthy businessmen and their flacks argue that any hint of populism on the part of politicians will upset people like them, and that this is bad for the economy. Once you concede that the government can act directly to create jobs, however, that whining loses much of its persuasive power — so Keynesian economics must be rejected, except in those cases where it’s being used to defend lucrative contracts.
诉求信心一直是反对税收及监管人士的一个关键论据；华尔街对奥巴马总统的抱怨是长期传统中的一部分，在这个传统之下，富裕的商人及其他们的吹鼓手提出，政治家方面任何民粹主义的暗示都会让他们这样的人失望，对经济没有好处。不过，一旦你承认政府可以直接采取行动创造就业，这种抱怨就失去了大部说服力——因此，凯恩斯经济学必须予以拒绝，除非它用于捍卫有利可图的合同的场合。
So I welcome the sudden upsurge in weaponized Keynesianism, which is revealing the reality behind our political debates. At a fundamental level, the opponents of any serious job-creation program know perfectly well that such a program would probably work, for the same reason that defense cuts would raise unemployment. But they don’t want voters to know what they know, because that would hurt their larger agenda — keeping regulation and taxes on the wealthy at bay.
因此，本人欢迎武装凯恩斯主义的忽然盛行，它显示出了我们政治争论背后的现实。在基本层面上，反对所有认真的创造就业计划的人士其实十分清楚这些计划可能是可行的，正是出于同样的理由，削减国防开支会提高失业率。但是，这些人不让选民知道他们所知道的事情，因为那样会伤害他们更大的计划——将监管和税收远离富人。
from 译言-每日精品译文推荐 http://article.yeeyan.org/view/100667/228600