There's another universe where President Joe Biden signs his so-called Inflation Reduction Act into law, but in March 2021 — when inflation was 2.6%, rather than approaching double digits.
The San Francisco Fed estimates that Biden's $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan caused more than half of last year's inflation. This new bill modestly reduces the annual multitrillion-dollar deficit by $300 billion through 2031. Had this been tried instead of the American Rescue Plan, perhaps that would have offset inflation.
Let's recap some elementary macroeconomics. Despite the collective amnesia of the Fed, the Hill, and the rest of the financial establishment over the past decade, inflation is a monetary phenomenon. The formula may not be exact, but since the inception of the Fed, irregular and elevated expansion of the money supply has always preceded bad bouts of inflation.
In that context, a reduction of tens of billions from the annual deficit means little. More importantly, the Keynesian guidebook is poorly equipped to handle our current morass of stagflation. John Maynard Keynes prescribed the use of fiscal policy to spend against the wind — that is, to have government run deficits to induce demand during recessions and then save to curb demand during inflation. But our economy is both too hot and too cold for this to work.