Josh Barro cuts through some recent confusions.

There have been an awful lot of unwarranted victory laps in the last few days by opponents of New York’s Amazon HQ2 subsidy deal. They point to the new lease Amazon has signed for office space on the West Side of Manhattan and ask, What would have been the point of giving Amazon $3 billion when it was going to do it for free all along?

For the record, I didn’t favor the Amazon subsidy deal, either. I thought its costs would have outstripped its benefits. But I still realize that what we’re getting now is not at all what we would have gotten if the deal had gone through.