Welcome to Beg to Differ, The Bullworks weekly roundtable discussion featuring civil conversation across the political spectrum from center left to center right.

I'm Mona Charon, syndicated columnist and policy editor at the Bullwork. I'm joined by our regulars

Linda Chavez of the Niskannon Center, Damon Linker of the Week, and Bill Galston of the Brookings Institution and the Wall Street Journal.

Our special guest this week is Despen Lockman of the American Enterprise Institute,

formerly Deputy Director, the IMF's Policy Development Department and Managing Director and Chief

Emerging Market Economic Strategist at Sullivan Smith Barney. So welcome one and all.

Des, thank you so much for joining us. I was very thrilled to get your participation this

week because you are one of the rare voices out there in the midst

of a lot of cheering about this $1.9 trillion stimulus. Of course, Damon also has some reservations, but there's a lot of sort of, you know, happy talk and you've written a little bit about your worries about inflation.

So it looks like by the time this is all tallied,

we will have spent something like five trillion dollars since the start of the pandemic

which amounts to 25% of the pre-pandemic economy.

Has there ever been anything like this in history, in our history?

Well, I don't think in the United States, you might have to look south of the border to places

like Argentina and Brazil to see that kind of fiscally responsibility.

So this in my mind can't end very well.

In the United States we certainly haven't had this kind of peacetime fiscal stimulus.

And it's as you mentioned, we're talking about enormous amounts of money.

So when we're looking at the Biden stimulus,

that is an amount of $1.9 trillion,

but that comes on the heels of a $900 billion

stimulus that was agreed by the bipartisan Congress in December of last year.

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