Can the Government Create Jobs?

Paul Krugman in the Times, on the rhetoric of job creation:

A few years back Representative Barney Frank coined an apt phrase for many of his colleagues: weaponized Keynesians, defined as those who believe “that the government does not create jobs when it funds the building of bridges or important research or retrains workers, but when it builds airplanes that are never going to be used in combat, that is of course economic salvation.” . . .

Paul Krugman, "Bombs, Bridges, and Jobs," New York Times, 31 October 2011.