Barro blowing up Krugman and "the stimulus"

From an interview with Robert Barro in The Atlantic, excerpted in the WSJ...

Check out the BOMB he drops at the end-- similar to something I had analyzed and written about earlier...

Atlantic: And I take it from the Wall Street Journal piece you wrote last week . . . well, the piece is just specifically about measuring multipliers, but I take it that you are fairly skeptical in general that fiscal policy will boost aggregate demand.

Barro: Right. There's a big difference between tax rate changes and things that look just like throwing money at people. Tax rate changes have actual incentive effects. And we have some experience with those actually working.

Atlantic: What would you say is the best empirical evidence there?

Barro: Well, you know, it worked to expand GDP for example in '63 and '64 with the Kennedy/Johnson cuts. And then Reagan twice in '81 and '83 and then in '86. And then the Bush 2003 tax-cutting program. Those all worked in the sense of promoting economic growth in a short time frame....

Atlantic: Do you read Paul Krugman's blog?

Barro: Just when he writes nasty individual comments that people forward.

Atlantic: Oh, well he wrote a series of posts saying he thought the World War II spending evidence was not good, for a variety of reasons, but I guess . . .

Barro: He said elsewhere that it was good and that it was what got us out of the depression. He just says whatever is convenient for his political argument. He doesn't behave like an economist. And the guy has never done any work in Keynesian macroeconomics, which I actually did. He has never even done any work on that. His work is in trade stuff. He did excellent work, but it has nothing to do with what he's writing about.