Joseph Mendola of Warner has a degree in political science with a minor in economics.

Inflation is inflicting more pain on working people in America. So says Federal Reserve Chairperson Jerome Powell. The pain is coming from the inflation that the Democrats are allowing to remain high with their spending policies. Remember the decrease in the budget deficit promised in the Inflation Reduction Act? President Biden wiped that saving out recently with the stroke of a pen by forgiving an estimated $500 billion of student loan debts.

President Biden is unintelligent about economic principles, unlike his two national economic advisers Brian Deese, director of the National Economic Council, and Cecilia Rouse, chair of the Council of Economic Advisors. But these two advisors seem to have forsaken the economic principles they know to be true — throwing too much money at too few goods fans the fire of inflation. This is what the climate change spending allotted in the Inflation Reduction Act plus the forgiveness of student loans will do.

This economic principle has been the definition of inflation taught in every college-level introduction course on economics. Dr. Paul Samuelson wrote my college-level macroeconomic textbook 50 years ago. In my macroeconomics course taken recently at UNH, this same definition of inflation was taught.

Here is a metaphor for what economic principles tell us about inflation. There is a bathtub full of water. The bathtub is our economy and the water is all of the money that the federal government and the Federal Reserve have pumped into the economy. The Federal Reserve knows that to lessen inflation the water (money) has to come out of the economy. So, it is using a bucket to take the water out.

The Democrats have their hand on the faucet and keep pouring more money into the economy with the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act. They are working against the Federal Reserve’s effort to take money out of the economy. Deese and Rouse know what the Democrats are doing and they know that those efforts will keep the cost of food, gas and heating our homes this winter high, but they will not tell us this. Why? Because it would discredit the recently-passed Build Back Better Act.

There is a strong incentive for politicians today to change the definition of many of our long-standing economic definitions like “recession” to deflect from the outcomes of economic policies of the Biden Administration in the last two years.

This begs the question of who will pay for this student loan relief. If you are a tradesperson, a laborer or someone in a job that does not require a college education, or if you could not afford to go to college because you did not have the money. Or if you are someone like me who played by the rules and did not take expensive vacations or buy new cars and saved their money to pay off their children’s student loans. We all are paying for the people who are not fulfilling their responsibility to pay their debts.

The money spent on global warming prevention will not decrease the world temperature very much as China is operating the largest coal-fired power plant in the world, located in Datang Tuoketuo. China’s “Belt and Road” initiative is building coal-fired power plants in third world countries too. Unless our international leadership can get China on board with reducing carbon emissions, all the current spending plan will do is destroy our economy and financially harm America’s working people.

If you want to save our economy so you can provide for your family, make your voice heard on election day.