Public Debts and Fiscal Politics: How to Decide?
探讨公共赤字并非总是坏事，在衰退期可刺激需求、降低失业，长期可优化消费和福利，但当前赤字可能过度，需分析原因并寻求对策。
The phenomenal growth in our public deficits over the past twenty years is a matter of public and professional concern (see Symposium, 1989). While this concern may indeed be well founded (particularly given current deficit levels), public deficits are not always bad. Certainly in times of deep recessions, short-term deficit financing can stimulate aggregate demand, increase national income, and reduce unemployment in a Keynesian fashion (see Richard Startz, 1989). Second, long-term deficit financing may be needed to sustain a long-term path of optimal consumption (see Peter Diamond, 1965). Third, public deficits (including pay-as-yougo Social Security) can offer welfare gains for significant subsets of consumers who have been liquidity constrained (R. Glenn Hubbard and Kenneth Judd, 1986), who have been unable to purchase indexed private annuities (Alan Blinder, 1988), or who have been unable to sufficiently diversify their investment portfolios away from human capital (Robert Merton, 1983). Finally, Robert Barro (1979) has argued that public deficits may be an important policy instrument to insure intertemporal welfare maximization when public expenditures are stochastic and public taxes are economically inefficient; taxes can be smoothed to reduce the lifetime excess burden of public financing. The concern today is not that we have deficits, but rather that we may be overdoing a good thing. If this is the issue, then we need to ask: Why, and what can be done about it? This is my agenda here. I. The Political Economy of Recent Deficits