New Jersey voters will hear plenty about the Democratic Party's dubiously titled Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 in the coming weeks.

 The Democratic National Committee announced plans to tout the party's signature achievement in the midterms with a "seven-figure" media campaign, featuring national cable buys, gas station advertisements, digital ads and radio buys, including spots in Spanish-language and Native American media.

"We’re proud to take our message directly to the American people and remind them that thanks to President Biden and Democrats, powerful special interests lost and Americans won,'' Democratic National Committee Chairman Jaime Harrison said in a statement.

This kind of bold, almost Trumpian salesmanship is for a $740 billion package, which is not likely to lower gas and grocery prices before sticker-shocked voters head to the polls in November, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Yet it's a visionary statement, a blueprint for a seismic transfer in the coming years from fossil fuel to clean energy cars and power plants. And it just might lower prescription drug prices down the road.

But now that the Democrats have upped the ante for the midterms, it begs the question: What is the Republican plan to tame the inflation beast?

Not much of anything, it turns out. A survey and interviews with several New Jersey House Republican candidates produced a mashup of broad-stroke, focus-group campaign talking points and tired free-market and supply-side nostrums from the Reagan era.

To a certain extent, this could be seen as an encouraging sign. Dusted-off nostrums from an earlier time are far preferable to the nationalist MAGA nonsense of the Trump era. And there has been a shift in tenor now that the Republican candidates no longer have to pander solely to the cultists who flex their muscle in the primaries. They are casting themselves as reasonable, bipartisan brokers.

Still, the Republicans have yet to formulate a compelling alternative to the Inflation Reduction Act. Like the prospect of gas prices dropping to under $3 a gallon, the GOP counterproposal seems a long way off.

In the campaign slogan talking point department, we have Republican Sen. Thomas H. Kean Jr., the party's candidate for the 7th Congressional District, who starred as the "pro-cop, pro-border security, inflation-fighting conservative" in his primary ad, only to refashion himself now for the general election as a neighborly produce clerk at a Whole Foods Market.

"This November, we have the opportunity to elect a Congressman and a Congress that actually wants to break the back of inflation,'' he said in a statement. He is making his second attempt to oust Democrat Tom Malinowski.

 "That means reining in D.C.'s addiction to spending, promoting American industry to open up supply chains, supporting middle class tax relief, and backing energy independence to lower gas prices. I'm running to take my vision and my record of fighting for affordability down to Washington, DC, so the people of this district will have someone who cares about their wallet,'' he concluded

A rough draft for a stump speech? Possibly. But a plan to lower food prices? Empty calories.

Paul DeGroot, the Republican seeking to dislodge Democrat Mikie Sherrill from the Morris County-centric 11th Congressional District, took a similar approach.

After leveling a scathing attack on Sherrill for failing to lift the state and local tax deduction limit of $10,000 — a vow she and other Democrats first made in 2018 — and for voting with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi 99% of the time, DeGroot finally got around to answering the question.

Again, more big-picture talking points.

"We must stop runaway spending, restore energy independence to immediately drop prices on shelves, remove irrelevant pet projects from legislation, and stop paying people not to work,'' he said.

Bob Healey, the Republican in the 3rd Congressional District who is squaring off against U.S. Rep. Andy Kim, did take aim at a provision in the Inflation Reduction Act that would impose taxes on crude oil and imported petroleum

Healey cited a pizza shop owner who is now paying a "gas surcharge" on every order placed for essential ingredients. "I don't think that cools inflation whatsoever, particularly when it comes to paying for it at the pump,'' he said in an interview.

But Healey, who is chairman of a Burlington County-based yacht-making company, believes that a balanced budget — the perennial talking point and ever elusive dream of conservative Republicans — will prevent profligate government spending and minimize the amount of unneeded money pouring into the economy and driving up prices.

"You know, look, frankly, I think one really good antidote to this sort of problem is a balanced budget, whether that's an amendment or a law,'' he said, and then, to illustrate his point, Healey turned to a familiar trope shared over the generations by businesspeople trying to transition into politics.

"You know, I don't have the option to print more money,'' he said. "Sometimes you can go into debt; you have to make calculated decisions on whether that's worth it ... I just feel that a little more economic business sense being brought to the table would be a heck of a lot more helpful than what we've been doing."

Balanced budgeting has been a dream of H. Ross Perot and Newt Gingrich, the former House Republican leader in the 1990s. Economists have warned that the steep cuts required to keep a budget in balance could trigger recessions, and the law could hamstring the country's ability to respond to emergencies — like a pandemic.

Few in Congress carry the torch of a balanced budget anymore, especially after Trump ran up huge deficits with his 2017 tax cuts. The GOP's fiscal hawks have long flown the coop.

Frank Pallotta, the Republican candidate who will make his second attempt to defeat incumbent Josh Gottheimer in the 5th Congressional District in North Jersey, also wants to revive the Keystone XL pipeline to bolster domestic oil production, and thus help drive down gas prices.

But the Washington Post Fact Checker could not find any economists making the claim that the pipeline — which would carry crude oil from Canada to the Gulf Coast — would lower prices in the near term.

Pallotta also has other macroeconomic antidotes to inflation. He believes in enacting policies to lure companies back to the United States, which would boost production, create more jobs and thus spur economic growth and reduce inflation.

And once that happens, argues Pallotta, a former Wall Street investment banker, the government should step aside and "allow the free markets to take over."

"When we stay out of the way of the markets and we help just with proper regulations and proper legislation ... the capital markets take over [and] take government money out of circulation,'' he said. "And we need to figure out how to put free-market capital back in circulation."

That sounds like an interesting conversation for policy wonks to have in a conference room at the New York Federal Reserve, but it's not going to capture the imagination of anxious voters tallying up their grocery bills at the kitchen table.

The fact is that the GOP doesn't really have a plan but a political strategy. And it's simply this: Attack the Inflation Reduction Act as a tax-and-spend hammer on the beleaguered middle class, and scare people into believing that squadrons of newly hired Internal Revenue agents will be "coming after you,'' when, in fact, the projected 87,000 IRS hires authorized by the new bill will be primarily support and administrative staff, to fill a backlog of vacancies and to replace thousands expected to retire in the next decade.

After discrediting the Democratic plan, they'll then hope to offer themselves as the candidates who vow to bring change, even if they lack specific solutions.

The Democrats, however, have made this race now a choice between two visions of government. And right now, it's a meaty plan (with a dubious slogan) versus a plate of policy rehash full of empty calories.