With less than two weeks away from the midterm elections, Republicans are campaigning hard against the opposing party by continuing to point out the high inflation numbers.

The annual inflation rate right now is 8.2% according to the U.S. Labor Department. This comes as the U.S. national debt recently surpassed $31 trillion for the first time in history.

Friday on Alabama Public Television’s “Capitol Journal,” U.S. Rep. Jerry Carl (R-Mobile) said he’s not optimistic about inflation coming down anytime soon.

“Well I’m a pretty positive person, I don’t like to feed on the negative too much and I assure you what I’m hearing is not good,” Carl said. “It’s not a good outlook in the direction we’re going. We’re pouring way too much money, spending too much money. We’ve got to figure out a way of cutting back.”

The congressman blamed the president for making the inflation problem even worse.

“It’s not looking very promising, especially with this administration,” he said. “They want to throw money, they want to buy as money votes as they can. That’s what this is all about. They’re just trying to throw money out there instead of trying to be good governors of money.”

Carl said the focus right now should be on lowering energy prices, but pointed out how the current administration is doing the opposite it should be when it comes to accomplishing that goal.

“Let’s look and see how we can get energy prices back down,” he said. “Shutting down our drilling industry is not going to bring these prices back down. So these are some of the things that after the election of 2022, when we take the House, these are some of the things we’re going to be laser-focused on.”

The lawmaker believes the Republicans will get right to work at tackling the inflation problem as soon as they gain control of Congress.

“We’re already looking in our different committee on how we can cut back at the federal level,” he said. “The states need to do the same… the very first thing we’re going to be doing right out of the chute, those 87,000 IRS agents that the president got pushed through, we’re going to try to defund that. We’re going to stop it. We don’t need a bunch of IRS going and putting the squeeze on all the small businesses.”

Yaffee is a contributing writer to Yellowhammer News and hosts “The Yaffee Program” weekdays 9-11 a.m. on WVNN. You can follow him on Twitter @Yaffee