No sooner had Joe Biden proposed his American Rescue Plan last January than Larry Summers went on TV to warn that the question wasn’t “whether this package would overheat the economy”; if passed as written, “it would overheat the economy.”

Since then, scarcely a day has gone by without the former Treasury secretary announcing some prophecy of inflationary doom. He’s warned of “inflationary pressures of a kind we have not seen in a generation.” He’s charged the White House and the Federal Reserve with running “the least responsible macroeconomic policies we’ve had in the last forty years.”

In struggling to convey the full magnitude of their folly, he’s even resorted to peppering his normally arid official-sector diction — in Summers-speak, appropriate is the highest term of praise, and people suggest things rather than say them — with vivid metaphors of haplessness: Biden’s economy as a car barreling down the highway at a perilous speed; the Fed as a clueless host who fails to take the punch bowl away before the party devolves into a mass of swaying inebriates.