Children will be heading back to school soon, and as we go through this yearly rite of passage, we’re all understandably looking at it through the lens we’ve unfortunately been looking at too many things this year.

The lens of inflation.

“I feel like everything is going up these days,” Jessica Reyes told the Associated Press. “I think it’s greatly affected us in all areas, in bills and in house necessities and school necessities.”

It’s unfortunate that what should be a happy, momentous occasion for America’s families is being marred with anxiety and apprehension.

It’s unfortunate that our leaders have been slow to take these challenges facing American families seriously, and have allowed other priorities, only tangentially related at best, to gum up the federal response to inflation.

The Inflation Reduction Act was unveiled in late July — months after families began grappling with higher costs.

The legislation, for which the Senate spent the weekend voting on amendments and will likely go to the House this week, includes strategies to reduce carbon emissions and promote renewable energy and closes tax loopholes for investors.

Some of what was initially included — like reducing insulin prices — are laudable goals, though we remain unsure yet if the provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act are the best approach to accomplishing that goal. But they are goals that nibble around the edges of reducing inflation in the future, possibly the distant future.

As Time magazine notes, many of the proposals repackaged in the Inflation Reduction Act were pitched by this White House as “job creation” measures a year to two years ago, when they were part of the Build Back Better legislation.

We’ve said it before and we fear we will have to say it again and again in coming weeks: What the U.S. needs is a focus on taming inflation now. Not on pursuing an old agenda by repackaging it as “inflation reduction” but by focusing on inflation.