The thing taking food off American tables isn’t inflation. It’s the creditors who insist we stamp it out by throwing people out of work. French Hill argues in “Inflation Is Stealing from Americans, but the Price Stability Act Can Help” that stripping the Fed of its employment mandate will protect working families by defeating the hidden tax of rising prices. He means well. He has the theft backwards. The Price Stability Act is a creditors’ charter dressed in worker clothes, and the people it would actually hurt are the very families he claims to defend.
I’ll grant the honest half, because it needs granting. Inflation does damage. When rent, eggs, and gas climb faster than a nurse’s paycheck, a budget breaks. Hill is right that a retiree on a fixed income sees real erosion, that a saver in a 0.5% account feels cheated, and that the 1970s taught a hard lesson about what unchecked price spirals do to a country. It deserves a serious policy answer, not a bumper sticker. The concession earns the standing to ask the question his piece never does: who actually benefits when the central bank’s only job is keeping prices flat, and who pays for it with their job?
The omission is the difference between a debtor and a creditor, and the piece never once asks which one its audience mostly is.
Here’s the arithmetic. The Fed fights inflation by raising interest rates until businesses stop hiring, workers lose their hours, and “aggregate demand cools.” That’s not a bug — it’s the point, and the polite term for layoffs. If you are a net debtor — carrying a mortgage, student loans, a credit-card balance, medical debt — then nominal wages rising while your fixed-rate debt stays the same is a real gain. That 30-year mortgage at 4% now costs a smaller slice of a bigger paycheck. The $35,000 student loan didn’t change; your salary did. Inflation, in the direction Hill despises, works for you, quietly shrinking your real burden every month.
Now consider the world the Price Stability Act builds. Rates spike to defend the dollar’s “purchasing power.” Credit tightens, hiring stops, paychecks stall or disappear. Your debt stays right where it was. The $35,000 still reads $35,000 on the statement, but now it takes two more years to pay off because the employer froze hiring and the overtime dried up. The math reverses. The debt gets heavier precisely because the economy around you got tighter. The bill would hand that reversal to the central bank as a standing order: crush inflation first, and the employment cost is someone else’s problem.
The piece presents inflation as the enemy of working families and never once asks whether those families are net debtors or net savers. Roughly two-thirds of American households own homes, most carrying a mortgage. About 44 million people hold federal student loans. Credit-card balances hit record highs last year. Medical debt touches roughly one in five American households. For this population — the population Hill names — the question isn’t just “how much does a gallon of milk cost” but “how much does my debt cost while I’m paying for the milk.” And that second number gets better in mild inflation and far worse in the tight-money regime this bill would institutionalize.
The historical precedent lives right there in the piece’s own decade of reference. Paul Volcker hiked rates to 20%, triggered double-digit unemployment, sent Black joblessness past 15 percent, and emptied factory towns across the Midwest. The only thing that showed up on the other side of the ledger was a bond-market rally. The European Central Bank, with its single mandate of price stability, presided over a decade of mass unemployment and youth joblessness above 20 percent in the South. The Bank of England’s “primary objective” did not spare British workers a long grinding wage squeeze after the Brexit inflation shock. The difference is not a fairy tale about structural reform; it is that American monetary policy under the dual mandate yields a few more people a seat at the table before the firing starts. The Price Stability Act would pull that seat away.
Strip the Fed’s employment mandate, and the practical effect is permission to tighten into a recession without once weighing the job it costs. Or the ten thousand jobs. The two million. Full employment is not an afterthought. For a family that can manage rising grocery prices but cannot survive a pink slip, it is the whole game. The Fed already knows how to fight inflation. It raises rates and accepts higher unemployment. The only question is whether it should do so with no obligation to look at the damage. The Price Stability Act answers: yes. Employment is someone else’s problem now. Your missing paycheck is a statistic for the Labor Department, not the central bank.
Beneath the civic language, the bill is a structural protection for one class: creditors. Fixed-rate lenders get paid in dollars worth what they contracted for. If inflation rises, those real returns shrink. A mandate forcing the Fed to crush inflation first fixes that problem, precisely and permanently. The beneficiaries are the people who lent you money; the cost is borne by the people who owe it and the people whose jobs disappear in the tightening. The guilty feel no pain. The piece does not name them. It doesn’t need to. The bill names them by the interest they are trying to preserve.
The real alternative to inflation is not unemployment. It is a country where workers have enough bargaining power to keep their paychecks rising without a recession engineered as the price of stability. Collective bargaining that lifts wages as prices climb. An expanded Child Tax Credit — the same credit that cut child poverty nearly in half before Washington let it lapse. Public banking that doesn’t charge 24% on an overdraft. Universal childcare, since a family that spends half its paycheck on daycare has no buffer left to absorb a spike in the price of anything else. Strong unions, sector-wide wage floors, a genuine commitment to full employment. These are the institutions that let families ride out a price shock without being told the only cure is to lose their job.
The working families Hill invokes don’t need a Fed that protects creditors. They need collective bargaining, the child tax credit, public banking, and universal childcare. Build those, and they finally have the protection the bill is only pretending to give them.
Wall Street doesn’t need a central bank to protect it. It has this bill instead.