“Everything goes up,” Marcia Freeman of Atlanta’s suburbs, told the Associated Press.

The 72-year-old has began visiting food banks to keep her grocery costs under control, according to an Associated Press article.

“It’s depressing,” truck driver Delores Bledsoe of Houston said.

“I feel the inflation pain every day,” Susana Hazard of New York City told the AP.

Americans are struggling and worried. And we need our leaders in Washington, D.C. to recognizes those struggles and fears and address them head-on.

We understand the some economists are hopeful we are at or near the peak. We certainly hope so, as well. But hoping isn’t planning.

We appreciate that the Federal Reserve is trying to address inflation through interest rate hikes — though the Federal Reserve has an appropriately limited set of tools and is not a body in which the American people have a democratic say.

We are not surprised that the temptation in our partisan system is to assign or deflect blame. But the message from the White House, the efforts to blame the struggles Americans are facing on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and on other factors conveniently outside President Joe Biden’s control are unacceptable.

We understand that the conservatives’ principles lead Republican politicians to attribute inflation to a run-up in federal spending.

We believe it is almost certainly a factor and we agree their needs to be further examination of spending’s role in how we got here.

Clearly, we support Republicans contesting and blocking efforts to attempt to spend more. It is critical that, having inflamed the economy with a massive glut of spending, Republicans be the voice of reason. The Republican caucus needs to prevent the federal government from making matters worse in the name of supposedly trying to make matters better. Any spending needs to be matched with cuts elsewhere.

But we also suspect, once the Republicans prove they are resolute in preventing more deficit spending, that some of that discussion can wait, and we implore our Republican legislators to focus on immediate solutions to minimize the damage inflation is inflicting on households like Freeman’s and Bledsoe’s and Hazard’s. There is no reason, in a democratic republic, for the American people to accept inaction by their democratically elected legislature and White House.

Our elected government needs to transparently debate solutions and pursue compromises to address this nerve-wracking issue.