经济学人下载:莱克星顿 马克罗·鲁比奥和他的安全网

Lexington
莱克星顿

Marco Rubio and the safety net
马克罗·鲁比奥和他的安全网

The Republican Party should take the Florida senator's ideas seriously
共和党应该把这位佛罗里达州议员的想法当真

MARCO RUBIO'S shoulder is sore. The junior senator from Florida has just had a cortisone injection to ease the pain from an old football injury. Congress is not short of square-jawed jocks. Given that politics often resembles a professional sport for the over-40s, this may be no coincidence. Mr Rubio, who won a college football scholarship, is an extreme case: his autobiography contains 26 references to the Miami Dolphins. This mania for running back and forth can overshadow another, distinctly un-jock, interest of Mr Rubio's, which is in social policy.
马克罗·鲁比奥最近肩膀酸痛。这位来自佛罗里达的中年译员刚刚进行了可的松激素注射，以缓解身上因踢足球所受旧伤的疼痛。国会里从来不乏这种方颌运动健将。鉴于政治一向像是40多岁中年人踢的职业比赛，这也许并不是巧合。曾获得过大学足球奖学金的鲁比奥则是其中的极端典型，他的自传里提到迈阿密海豚队的次数高达26次。这种对运动场上跑动的狂热掩盖了鲁比奥另外一个显然不那么运动的兴趣，即对社会政策的关注。

Over the past few months, while many of his colleagues have devoted themselves to mauling the president, he has proposed a series of government interventions to improve the lot of cash-strapped Americans. His aim is to have bills ready to go if Republicans take control of the Senate in November. This is not the first thing people associate with Mr Rubio, who came to national prominence when he defeated Florida's governor, Charlie Crist, in a Senate race in 2010. At the time he was described as the first Tea Party senator, which implied a desire to burn down government and pour salt on the ashes. This was mistaken.
过去的几个月里，在他的许多同事都投身于总统打压战时，鲁比奥却提出了一系列政府干预措施，以改善众多囊中羞涩的美国人的生活。在他的算盘中，如果共和党能够在11月份掌控参议院，这项议案也应当蓄势待发。但这不是人们提起鲁比奥时，最先联想起的事情。早在2010年，当他在参议员竞选中击败佛罗里达州州长查理·克里斯特时，鲁比奥就一战成名了。当时，他被描述成第一位茶党参议员。这个名号总让人觉得他想把政府一烧了之，还要在灰烬里撒盐以免其鬼魂为祸人间。但这其实只是误解。

Though Mr Rubio fitted the description of a young insurgent, his background is not that of an anti-government crusader. He first ran for public office aged 26, becoming a member of the city commission in West Miami, a town of 6,000 people. His tenure is remembered, if at all, for the introduction of a bicycle-mounted policeman. When Alberto Gutman, a state senator of distinctively Floridian heritage (he described himself as “Jewban”: ie, Jewish and Cuban) was indicted for a distinctively Floridian crime (Medicare fraud), opening up positions further down the food chain, Mr Rubio was elected to the statehouse aged just 28. His nine years there were mostly spent turning the agenda of Jeb Bush, a centrist Republican governor, into law. He also showed a wonkish streak, travelling around the state holding rather earnest-sounding “idea-raisers”: 100 proposals that emerged from them were subsequently turned into a book.
尽管鲁比奥很符合年轻异见者的形象，但他的背景却远不是那种反政府圣战士的标配。26岁时，他第一次竞选官职，成为了拥有6000万人口的西迈阿密城市委员会中的一员。如果他的任期中有值得铭记的事情，那一定是自行车骑警队伍的建立。28岁那年，因为很有佛罗里达特色的州议员阿尔贝托· 古特曼被以很有佛罗里达特色的罪名—医保欺诈—控告，为其下属腾出了席位，鲁比奥被选入州议会。他在这里工作了九年，绝大多数时间是把中立派民主党州长杰布·布什的议程付诸于法。他还展示出了他的书呆子潜质，曾真诚地打着“集中民智”的旗号，游历全州。征集到的百条提案随后都被出书。

When he arrived in the Senate Mr Rubio was hailed as a future saviour of a Republican Party struggling to appeal to Hispanic voters, on the basis that his parents had left Cuba in 1956. An already difficult task was made harder when he had a fight with Univision, the biggest Spanish-language network, in 2011. It became impossible when House Republicans declined to consider an immigration reform bill that Mr Rubio, along with three other Republicans and four Democrats, had put his name to. He has since concluded that a law to address the 12m undocumented migrants in the country will be impossible until the border is secure and the criteria for deciding who gets to come change from prioritising family reunification to favouring workers.
他一进入参议院，就被看做共和党未来的救星，因为共和党正在努力吸引西班牙裔选民，而父母在1956年离开古巴的鲁比奥自然吃香。但2011年，当鲁比奥与美国最大的西班牙语网站环球电视台展开口角时，这一本就艰难的任务变得难上加难。而当众议院的共和党人拒绝考虑鲁比奥、三名其他共和党人士和四名民主党人士签署的移民改革法案时，希望彻底破灭。自此，鲁比奥得出了一个结论，即除非边境安全得到确保，以及移民标准不再致力于让家庭重新团圆而是更加偏爱工人，解决国内1200万未登记移民问题的法律是不可能被通过的。

This will not win over the voters that the GOP had hoped Mr Rubio would magically deliver: even young Cubans, who have long stood out among Latinos for their attachment to the Republican Party, have started to switch their loyalties to the Democrats. On climate change, too, Mr Rubio is hardly a breath of fresh air. Most scientists, he says, agree that man is to blame, but he sees no point in imposing heavy economic costs on Americans for uncertain benefits.
但这也不能争取到大老党希望鲁比奥施展魔力吸引到的选民群们，长期以来，连拉美裔中一直因为亲近共和党而格外显眼的古巴年轻人群，都开始转而向民主党效忠。在气候变化问题上，鲁比奥也难以让人耳目一新。尽管他也承认，大多数科学家都认为人类就是气候变化的罪魁祸首，但却并无意为了不确定的利益，让美国人担起沉重的经济代价。

If Mr Rubio is going to rescue his party from anything it is from an overly narrow view of what government ought to do. Both Mr Rubio's parents worked at low-wage jobs—his father as a bartender, his mother at Kmart—but were able to provide a life for him and his siblings that was within touching distance of the middle class. In the years since then, he argues, a mixture of globalisation and automation have held down wages for low-skilled workers, making it harder for people without university degrees to repeat what his own parents managed to do.
如果鲁比奥真的要拯救共和党，那就必须改变其党派对政府职能过度狭隘的观点。鲁比奥的父母都是低薪工作者，他的父亲是一位酒保，而母亲则在零售商店凯马特中工作，但父母两人却能够为鲁比奥及其兄弟姐妹提供媲美中产阶级的生活。然而，鲁比奥认为，自那以后，全球化和自动化压低了技艺水平较低的工人的工资，使得没有大学学历的工人越来越重演鲁比奥父母的故事。

Mr Rubio has various proposals for addressing this, including a federal wage subsidy to top up the incomes of the low-paid. He wants to help more students go to college, but also thinks the federal government should experiment with hiring people without degrees for white-collar work, as an example to other employers. Some of these ideas are unlikely to fly, such as a scheme to allow students to sell a share of their future income in exchange for money to fund tuition up front. But they show an urge to innovate that the GOP's Congressional wing has been missing.
对此，鲁比奥提出了不同议案，包括一项联邦工资补贴，来补贴低收入者的工资水平。他想要帮助更多的学生就读大学，但与此同时，他认为联邦政府也应当试着雇佣没有大学学历的人群来从事白领工作，以为其他的雇主带个好头。但鲁比奥的有些构想是不可能有前途的，比如他曾计划让学生放弃一部分未来的收入，以预先用来支付学费。尽管如此，这些想法仍然展现了共和党在国会中缺失的一种创新欲望。

Does a safety net give people courage to soar?
安全网会让美国人更加勇敢地高飞吗？

This is daring stuff in the context of today's Republican Party because it envisages a role for government that many conservatives would find distasteful. Where Republican orthodoxy suggests saving poor people from welfare dependency by mercifully reducing the amount of money they receive, Mr Rubio aims to cut welfare spending by reducing the demand for it, keeping funding at the same level but handing anti-poverty programmes over to the states to figure out what works. “I don't take my children to the circus very often,” he says, “but when I do I have noticed that acrobats tend to be much more daring when they have a safety net beneath them.” Such support “is essential for the success of the free enterprise system”.
鲁比奥代表了当今共和党派中富有胆识的一派，因为他们为政府构想的职能，是许多保守党派深觉反感的。当共和党中的老派人士建议通过仁慈地降低福利水平，以拯救穷人对福利项目的依赖时，鲁比奥却计划通过降低需求来减少福利开支，将补助水平维持原有标准不改变的同时，把反贫困项目下放到各州，来找出其中有效的方案。他说：“我并不经常带小孩去马戏团，不过有时候去，我注意到当下面有安全网时，杂技演员会更勇敢。”因此，这样的支持“对自由企业体制的成功至关重要”。

It is hard to imagine some other Republicans with presidential ambitions saying anything like that. Senators Rand Paul of Kentucky and Ted Cruz of Texas, for example, often give the impression that the only thing standing between America and a restoration of the upwardly mobile society of the 1950s is a more faithful interpretation of the constitution. Mr Rubio is only 43, so he is probably not experienced enough to take on Hillary Clinton in 2016. But right now he is the most effective standard-bearer for conservatives who worry more about reducing poverty and long-term unemployment than about waging culture wars and cutting income tax. Whoever wins in November, these thoughts are worth taking seriously.
很难想象其他有志成为总统的共和党人士会说出这样的话。举个例子，肯塔基州的参议员保罗·兰德和德克萨斯州的特德·克鲁兹常常给人的印象就是，挡在美国和复兴上个世纪五十年代处在上升时期的移动社会之间的唯一阻碍，就是对宪法更为诚实的解读。鲁比奥今年仅有43岁，因此他的资历也许不足以使他在2016年接替希拉里·克林顿。但就目前而言，他是保守党最具效率的旗手，因为比起发动战争和减少个人所得税，现在的保守党显然更担忧减少贫困和降低长期失业率的问题。不管在11月份谁将笑到最后，鲁比奥的想法都值得认真考虑。