The opening salvo was the American Rescue Plan, which came in for immense criticism as "the most irresponsible fiscal policy in 50 years". Soaring inflation seemed to vindicate the critics 2/

But now inflation seems to be coming down as fast as it went up. The new Team Transitory warns that this improvement won't last — but it's getting harder to make that case 3/

Here's "supercore" inflation — ex food, energy, shelter (which we know is very lagged) and used cars 4/

And here's average hourly earnings, skipping the period when pandemic compositional effects caused huge distortions 5/

Meanwhile, we seem to have avoided the "scarring" many feared, with the labor market recovering to pre-crisis levels far faster than it did after the financial crisis 6/

Maybe new data will make the picture look worse in a few months. But right now it looks as if we achieved rapid recovery at the cost of maybe 20 months of elevated inflation. 7/

Obviously we've had problems, and would do things differently with the benefit of hindsight. But does this outcome really look like a catastrophe? 8/

@pkrugman things would have looked a lot worse if Manchin didn't block Biden's original spending bill. I think you should be intellectually honest and address the fact that Manchin and other Republicans saved Biden from making bigger catastrophic mistakes.