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Surveys find entrenched (根深蒂固的) pessimism over the country’s economic outlook and overall trajectory (轨道). In the latest Wall Street Journal poll, 63% of the respondents said the U.S. is on the wrong track. It’s not difficult to see why. Set aside the gridlock in Washington for a moment and appreciate the weakness of the economic recovery: Households whose finances were too weak to spend. Large numbers of unemployed workers who couldn’t do so either. Younger Americans who couldn’t afford their own homes. Banks that were too broken to lend. Yet nearly a year ago, I wrote an essay for Time suggesting that the economy could surprise on the upside. That hypothesis looks even more valid today. Despite the pessimistic mood, America is experiencing a profound comeback. Yes, too many Americans are out of work and have been for far too long. And yes, there is a huge amount of slack to make up. In fact, if the 2008 collapse had not happened, the U.S. GDP would be $1 trillion— or more than 5%—higher than it is today. But in terms of the growth outlook, the news is good. Goldman Sachs and many private-sector forecasters project a 3.3% growth rate for the remainder of 2014. The first half of 2014 saw the best job-creation rate in 15 years. Total household wealth and private employment surpassed 2008 levels last year. Bank loans to businesses exceeded previous highs this year. And income growth will soon improve too. America is finally returning to where it was seven years ago. As halting as the U.S. recovery has been, the economy is now leaner and more capable of healthy, sustained growth through 2016 and beyond. The U.S. outlook shines compared with that of the rest of the industrialized world, as Europe and Japan are stagnant. The 2008 economic crisis and Great Recession forced widespread restructuring throughout the U.S. economy—not unlike a company gritting its teeth through a lifesaving bankruptcy. Manufacturing costs are down. The banking system has been recapitalized. The excess and abuse that defined the housing market are gone. And it’s all being turbocharged by an energy boom nobody saw coming. According to the second paragraph, which one is true
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The country’s biggest challenge now is the plight of lower-income Americans, who are under severe and sustained economic pressure. Today, America resembles a tale of two cities. Those who own homes or stocks have benefited from the recovery in these asset classes and are moving up again. But 40% of working-age families earn $40,000 a year or less. Generally they live within 250% of the official poverty level, which is the eligibility threshold for food stamps. Indeed, judging from current trends, half of today’s 20-year-olds will receive food stamps during their adult lives. More broadly, median household income is still 8% below the precrisis level, and those who have not completed college are seeing declines in anticipated lifetime earnings compared with their peers with college degrees. This is the primary economic challenge. If a third of the population has little purchasing power, it will be hard to achieve the desired rate of long-term growth. The U.S. needs to improve the work skills of this group, strengthen the social safety net and increase the number of young Americans receiving a full college education. Although doing more to relieve the financial burdens of working Americans is good economics, it is also, and perhaps more important, a matter of values. For much of the 20th century Americans strove, with much success, to build a fairer and more inclusive society. But today, too many working families are living paycheck to paycheck or even in outright poverty, while the toeholds (客服困难的方法) to economic stability become fewer and farther between. With the economy’s near and medium term economic outlook strong, now is the time to remove the barriers that are keeping hardworking Americans walking a far too thin financial line. The last two paragraphs tell us that ______.
One reason why shareholder activism has been increasing is that regulators have encouraged it, especially on pay. For a decade Britain has required firms to give shareholders a non-binding annual vote on executive pay. The colossal Dodd-Frank act of 2010 gave shareholders in American companies a "say on pay", too. Now comes two new moves. On March 3rd the Swiss voted to oblige firms to hold a binding annual vote on director’s pay: in the small print, the referendum also banned golden handshakes and severance packages for board members, and bonuses that encourage the buying or selling of firms. Then on March 5th E.U. finance ministers (with only Britain objecting) agreed to cap bankers’ bonuses to 100% of their basic salary, or 200% if shareholders vote for it. If the Swiss had merely given shareholders an annual vote on pay, it would have been a good thing; but the accompanying bans are not. There are times when a golden handshake to a talented manager can be in shareholders’ interests: far better to let the owners vote on it than restrict the firm from trying it. The E.U.’s proposal has less still to recommend it. The rationale for it is that banking bonuses have encouraged risk taking, because they reward bankers hugely for bets that come off and punish them only slightly for those that don’t. But banks have come a long way since the crisis, by deferring bonuses and making them partly payable in their own debt and equity. Blunt laws could undermine such progress. And bonus caps will either hold pay down, thus sending clever people elsewhere, or push up salaries, thus making pay less responsive to performance. Enpowering shareholders is a good idea; requiring them to channel populist fury is not. It would be good for Swiss to ______.
进行固定资产日常业务处理。
America has seen a drop in crime rates that in earlier years would have been universally viewed as impossible. The overall crime rate has plummeted by 45% since peaking in 1991 and by 13% just since 2007—counter intuitively continuing to drop through the recession and sharp spike in unemployment. Since 1991, according to FBI data, the number of violent crimes has fallen 36% nationally and 64% in the nation’s largest cities. And in New York and Los Angeles, the nation’s two largest cities, it has fallen even further. Property crime has also become increasingly rare. Incredibly, in New York City, car thefts have plunged 94% in the past two decades. How is this possible In the mid-1990s, few saw this decline coming, and many warned that crime would surge once again as teens of that era grew into young adults. Today, criminologists still differ on what has caused the nationwide turnaround in crime rates and why those dire predictions never came to pass. But crime-fighting technology, better policing, aging societies, growing urban populations and declining usage of hard drugs are widely cited. For many Americans, the drop in crime has resulted not only in a much higher quality of life but in a reduced economic burden as well. Safer cities generally mean stronger urban economies. In the same category of big surprises, teen-pregnancy rates have fallen to their lowest level in more than 30 years, according to the widely respected Guttmacher Institute. They have declined 51% from their 1990 peak, based on the latest available data, and the teenage birthrate is down 43% from that year’s level. Today, fewer teens are becoming pregnant and becoming mothers than at any point since reliable data has been collected by the National Center for Health Statistics. This is also true for women in the 20-to-24 age group. To put it mildly, there were very few predictions to this effect a generation ago. In addition, overall birth rates in the U.S. have turned up for the first time since 2007—including for children born to women in a college education—to just shy of 4 million. Which one is NOT the possible reason of the dropping crime rates
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