Well, the big question for most taxpayers, are we getting the most bang out of our buck?

Our next guest says that the answer to that is a big fat costly no. Jeffrey Miron has some pretty impressive credentials. He's a visiting professor in the Department of Economics at Harvard, and is also tied at MIT and the University of Michigan.

All right, Jeffrey, I think it was about a year ago, you said that this stimulus package was a bad idea.

You still think it is?

I still think it's a bad idea. And I should emphasize it's this stimulus package that I'm criticizing, because it was focused especially on spending rather than being focused on tax cuts. When you decide you're going to spend a lot of money quickly, it's very hard to spend it well, and a lot of the things we are spending it on are not especially productive or they are mainly just shifting people from jobs they already had into different government jobs. Had we done tax cuts, we would have put that purchasing power in the hands of individuals and firms, and that would have lead on average to much better decisions about how that extra demand would have been spent.

All right. Let's talk about the tax cuts for a minute. Because Jeffrey Sax, and you know Jeffrey Sax, highly- respected economist, said -- let me address that tax issue. You know, he says there is no room, nor case for broad-based personal or corporate income tax cuts or credits or rebates. He said the deficit is hemorrhaging and will do so for years to come. And with aging, health care cost increases, etcetera, the underlying chronic deficits will tend to rise, not fall. We will therefore need increased, not decreased taxes.

Well, Jeff is taken as given that we need to do all the spending that we are doing. But my position is that a huge amount of existing government spending is actually not especially productive. And over the long term, we should be cutting it very substantially.

And he is ignoring the evidence, okay, which part of it produced by Christina Romer, the chairman of the council of economic advisers under Obama, which finds that tax cuts are very effective in stimulating the economy evidenced by a lot of other people. It doesn't find much evidence that spending increases our effect at stimulating the economy. Either one, of course, adds to the deficit in the short term. But over the longer term, the tax cuts probably add less because they help make the economy more efficient and that leads to more income etcetera that can be taxed going down the road.

接下来是我们大部分纳税人都非常关心的问题，我们的钱包遭受的损失会不会减小？

我们的下一位嘉宾说，这个问题的答案是：绝对不是。Jeffrey Miron有一些令人印象非常深刻的凭据。他是哈佛大学经济学系的访问教授，还与麻省理工和密歇根大学有联系。

好的。Jeffrey，我记得大约一年前，你曾经说过，刺激计划是一个坏主意。

你现在还这样认为吗？

我现在仍然认为这是一个坏主意。我应该强调的是，我批评的是刺激计划本身，因为该计划特别集中于支出，而不是减税。你决定快速的花掉一大笔钱的时候，很难花的恰到好处，这些钱花费的有些地方并没有产生很好的效果，只是将人们从原有的工作岗位转移到政府提供的不同的工作岗位。如果能够降低税率，我们就可以将购买力置于个人和公司手中，这或许可以更好地决定多余的购买力应该花在哪些需求上面。

好的。让我们简单地说一下减税的问题。因为，Jeffrey Sax是一位非常受人尊敬的经济学家，他说——让我来解决税收问题。你知道，他说，没有任何空间或案例可以为广泛的个人或公司减少收入所得税，提供贷款或者提供回扣。他说，财政赤字已经高涨，而且几年来都会是如此。随着老龄化的加重，医疗保健成本也会增加，等等问题。隐藏的长期赤字将会上涨，而不是下降。所以，我们将需要提高税收，而不是减少。

Jeff是在假设我们需要进行所有支出活动。但是我的观点是，政府现在大量的支出项目都没有什么特别的效果。长期来看，我们必须根本地削减这些项目。

他忽略了一些证据，其中一部分是由奥巴马总统经济顾问委员会主席Christina Romer提出的，他们发现，减税对于刺激经济发展非常有效，其他许多人也曾证明了这一点。而他们并没有发现指出可以增加对刺激经济发展的影响。当然，短期内，两项措施都会增加财政赤字。但是长期来看，减税使财政赤字增加的幅度比较小，因为这可以使经济更加高效，而且使可以用来征税的收入也出现增长。