claudia sahm speaks to members of the gop. an extraordinary moment.to go back to the university of michigan where you took your phd. it has been one of the hotbeds of inflation research. what is your observation on the fear, the angst, the pendulum of inflation? claudia: i feel like we all have to take a deep breath. there has been way too much attention to the last set of data points, whether it is jobs are inflation or retail sales. we have a $21 trillion economy, we have tried to push it intentionally to get people back to work and back on track. this is exactly what we said was going to happen. you cannot get all excited about numbers that come in bigger than we thought. the entire last year, remember last year they were always worse than we expected. we are living context. it is scary, it is uncertain. i look at the consumer expectations numbers. people do not like inflation. this is true. they will tolerate it to a moderate level as long as wages are rising. what is really hard is not to have a job. we have to keep it in balance. tom: i am runni

for more on the significance of this budget, i�*ve been speaking to claudia sahm, a former us federalon is a lot of money. what we see in the budget is largely what president biden has already proposed in thejobs plan and the families plan. those two were big. that�*s 4 trillion right there. and we see a lot of investments in the physical infrastructure of the united states that needs a refresh and we see a lot of investment in people. and these pay off — this makes a lot of sense. this is getting to something better than february of 2020, but it�*s big dollars, there�*s no question about that. i mean, $6 trillion is almost unfathomable to try and think about. america might be in a pandemic—style state spending mode. it�*s been so, you could argue, even since the last year of the donald trump presidency. what happens, then, when that mood changes, as history shows that it always does? well, history doesn�*t repeat itself. it does rhyme, right, so we should be concerned about... i mean, frankly, we should be concerned about spending that kind of money, taxpayer dollars, and doing it ef