Brian Riedl

I hate to pile on to Brian Riedl after both Brad DeLong and Matthew Yglesias do a pretty good job debunking his latest in National Review Online.

But...

There's much in Brian's piece that requires criticism, but here's the graph that is the most offensive:

The idea that government spending creates jobs makes sense only if you never ask where the government got the money. It didn’t fall from the sky. The only way Congress can inject spending into the economy is by first taxing or borrowing it out of the economy. No new demand is created; it’s a zero-sum transfer of existing demand.