Good for Mike Pence for releasing a plan to fight inflation. His plan has four points: Reduce deficit spending, allow increased energy production, use deregulation to bring supply chains home, and change the Federal Reserve’s statutory mandate.

The Fed is commonly said to have a “dual mandate”: It’s supposed to keep both inflation and unemployment low. It actually has a third statutory goal: keeping interest rates at moderate levels. Over the years, Republicans have sometimes suggested that it would make for a more predictable and rules-based monetary policy if the Fed had only one goal: keeping prices stable. (Ron DeSantis, in this clip, sounds sympathetic to this idea.)

Pence wants the Fed instead to have the single goal of keeping interest rates stable. I am not sure it would be wise for the Fed to adopt this way of looking at its job. But I imagine that if the law were changed as Pence suggests, it would just do whatever it thinks best and say it’s the best way to keep interest rates stable in the long run. It can’t realistically stabilize interest rates if inflation is running high or we’ve entered a depression.