Robbing Peter to pay Paul

Can anyone tell me a coherent argument that government spending stimulates the economy? In today's Wall Street Journal I read about California closing it's $26 billion budget gap, a good thing right? Apparently not:

Economists said the spending cuts will bruise a California economy already slammed by rising unemployment and foreclosure rates. "It will certainly offset a fraction of the federal-stimulus effect this fall," said Roger Noll, a professor emeritus of economics at Stanford University. "That will mean the depth and duration of the recession [in California] will both be bigger than otherwise would've been the case," he said.

I am sure this guy is way smarter than me, but stupid is as stupid says. This increasingly repeated mantra that spending is good has got to stop. We have spent and spent and spent and no good has come of it. At what point will the "faithful" give up their insane beliefs? Once again we have someone concocting an alternative theory of the present. How does he know what would have been the case? If he and all these other brilliant people advocating spending knew, we wouldn't be in the situation we are in.

Think about it, for the government to spend money they have to first take it from someone else. How does taking one dollar from Peter and giving it to Paul create anything? It doesn't. Peter would have spent the money just as Paul would have spent the money. What else would Peter have done with it? The only thing accomplished in this transfer is the added inefficiency of government. That's it and I dare anyone to show how this is not the case.