From the February 28, 2021, edition of MSNBC's Meet the Press

CHUCK TODD (HOST): Bret Stephens, I'm curious, you look at Republican leadership and they seem to be, "Alright, let's do the same thing we did in '09. It worked then." Here is the issue, though. In '09, it was clear the economy was still going south when they decided to essentially unanimously oppose Obama's relief bill. The economy is going to -- potentially could take off like a rocketship in the next nine months. What's this going to look like a year from now if the Democrats get to go say, “Hey, we passed this, they stood on the sidelines?” 

BRET STEPHENS (NEW YORK TIMES COLUMNIST): Yeah, that's a possibility. The other possibility is that when you're injecting close to $2 trillion into a growing economy, you're going to see the kind of inflationary pressures that we didn't have 12 years ago, precisely for the same reason, that the economy was going south. I think the Republicans are actually, from their point of view, playing this pretty smartly. The minimum wage provisions hurt small businesses, and people forget that just eight weeks ago we had a $900 billion relief package pass Congress. So the Republican argument, I think, is that the United States government is like an anaconda that's eating one too many alligators here. There's only so much that we can digest and money that we can pump out in a reasonable span of time.