中国财政科学研究院
Section A English to Chinese (20 points)Directions: Translate the underlined part of the following text into Chinese. Write your translation on your ANSWER SHEET.If Republicans in Congress unite behind Donald Trump’s agenda, it will not be because they have changed their views on economics. Whatever Mr. Trump’s plans for border taxes and fiscal stimulus, most Republicans still profess to support free trade and loathe government borrowing. (36) Instead, unity is possible because two other goals bind the president and his party together. The first, tax cuts, is a usual priority for the party. But the second, deregulation, only recently rose to the same status. The call to cut red tape(官样文章,冗长的法规条文)is now an emotive rallying cry for Republicans—more so, in the hearts of many congressmen, than slashing deficits. Deregulation will, they argue, unleash a “confident America” in which businesses thrive and wages soar, leaving economists, with their excuses for the “new normal” of low growth, red faced. Are they right?(37) The straightforward motivation for Republicans’ deregulatory agenda is their disdain for President Barack Obama’s legacy, much of which was installed through regulatory fiat. The Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare, required bureaucrats to write thousands of pages of new rules; the Dodd-Frank financial-reform bill did the same. (38) When legislation was not forthcoming, the executive branch threw its weight around instead. It asserted that the Clean Air Act gave it wide-ranging powers to fight climate change, and that the Clean Water Act let it clean up many more ponds and rivers than ever before.(39) But totting up costs and benefits is hardly straightforward. An agency which supports a regulation can obviously nudge the numbers in a favorable direction. Bureaucrats must sometimes make value judgments. For instance, the Obama administration counted benefits to foreign countries when weighing up rules to reduce carbon emissions.In any case, cost-benefit analysis ages badly. Without updating it, it is difficult to know how much old regulations weigh on the economy. One Mercatus working paper plugs the number of rules in each industry into a complex model of the economy. It finds that rules written since 1980 have dampened growth by about 0.8 percentage points a year.(40) Republicans like to put about that sort of figure, but it strikes many economists as implausibly large. Even those sympathetic to deregulation are hesitant to forecast the growth effects of a regulatory bonfire, preferring to stress the benefits of tax cuts. Democrats, meanwhile, are scathing about the idea that rolling back regulations would pep up the economy much. Jason Furman, who advised Mr. Obama, adds up the costs of Obama-era rules and says it is “impossible” to see how you would add even a tenth of a percentage point to growth by undoing them. (The Trump administration promises growth of 3.5%-4%, up from 1.6% in 2016, partly on the back of deregulation.)
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