[W]e're just trying to pour too much water in and I wish it were actually true that even a third of the money was going to people who were in poverty. Most of it is not. Most of it is going to the middle of the population and it is going in one shot transfers, not in things that are ultimately going to build and strengthen the economy. And that's why as much as I admire the effort and as much as I admire the progress against poverty, I am worried that the sheer scale is going to crowd out our doing what we need to do to compete with China, to build back better the president's principal aspiration. And I'm very worried that this is going to lead us to difficulty down the road as inflation picks up and the Fed has to respond.

Here is the irony: there is a lot that is good in this program, but I think its advocates try to have it both ways. On the one hand when a concern about inflation is raised, they explain that it is mostly temporary and transient, just a relief program, and really just a special one-year thing. On the other hand, most of the time they are explaining how it is the most fundamental revolution in American policy since the New Deal. And you can't really have it both ways. You can either have long term transformation or you can have temporary action. And what I would have liked to see more, is a program of this scale or larger that was paid for and was focused on investment and contained the necessary relief. This program goes vastly beyond ... what was necessary to provide relief. And it doesn't - with the exception of the childcare/antipoverty thing, which is very important - it doesn't really do much that either represents a revolution in social investment on social policy or a revolutionary investment in the future of our country. And I think that is something we are going to look back on and regret. Not that we didn't do something, but that we weren't more careful and calibrated in the design of what we did.

Larry Summers, debating Paul Krugman on Fareed Zakaria's GPS.