Stimulus Dust-up at LAT

DRH and KLR had interesting posts recently about the stimulus package now being considered by the senate. Steven Landsburg of the University of Rochester and Jason Furman (of Brookings) have had a series of three debates about the stimulus concept this week in the LA Times (here, here, and here).

It has been fun to read, and it makes me proud to have Landsburg's Price Theory on my book shelf (thank you first to David Hunger for assigning it, and then to the GU bookstore for refusing to buy it back). I am very skeptical of the stimulus package for a couple of reasons, but primarily because it is deficit spending-- as KLR has said, it is nothing but a transfer of wealth from future generations. I found Furman's posts to be frustrating at points. He tried to manipulate Landsburg's arguments but only awkwardly bastardized them; he didn't actually make effective use of them to draw a compelling line of reasoning (example: his discussion of how Landsburg would respond to the multiple choice question).