A few readers chime in this morning on my conversation with Brian Riedl regarding the futility of deficit spending as an economic stimulant:

I remember an epiphany I had as a child, suffering a muggy South Louisiana summer. “Why,” I asked my mother, “can’t we just keep the refrigerator door open and then it will REALLY cool the house.” In her patient way, she showed me the back-side of the refrigerator, and had me touch the coils. “See how warm they are? The refrigerator takes the heat out of the air but has to dump it somewhere: the heat from the coils is where it goes. If you keep the door open, it will just move the heat right back into the same room.”

Another:

I wish you’d had some discussion of efficiency. What are the costs associated with funneling $1 trillion dollars through the government bureaucracy? What percentage of each dollar is consumed in bureaucratic administration? Is it $0.10 per dollar? $0.20? And how much more efficient is the private sector?