Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke tried to assure House Republicans today that the Fed is committed to keeping inflation under control, even as it continues its easy money policies.

Inflation appears to “be very well-controlled now,” Bernanke said, and should remain below the Fed’s 2 percent target “for the next couple of years.” This view is backed up, he said, by “more stable commodity prices and substantial slack in labor and product markets.”

House Budget Committee Paul Ryan, however, is concerned the Fed is moving away from its commitment to keep inflation low while it tries to juice up the economy.

At a hearing today on Capitol Hill, the Wisconsin Republican told Bernanke that he “was greatly concerned to hear the Fed recently announce that it would be willing to accept higher-than-desired inflation in order to focus on the other side of its dual mandate, which is promoting employment.”

That would be a mistake, Ryan said, because “the Fed’s tools for promoting employment are limited, imprecise, and can have highly undesirable consequences.”

For example, the Fed’s announcement that it plans to keep interest rates at extremely low levels through late 2014 “runs the great risk of fueling asset bubbles, destabilizing prices, and eventually eroding the value of the dollar,” Ryan said. “The prospect of all three is adding to uncertainty and holding our economy back.”

Inflation, Ryan said, “can be quick to materialize and painful to eradicate once it takes hold.”

Bernanke assured Ryan that the Fed “will not actively seek to raise inflation or move away from the target.” Low inflation generally is good for employment, he said.

“Most of the time there is a complementary relationship between those two,” he said.

Ryan also expressed concern that the Fed’s ongoing purchases of Treasury notes are keeping interest rates on these notes artificially low and is “lulling federal policymakers into a false sense of security.” Without the Fed’s purchases, the rates the Treasury Department would be forced to pay on these debt instruments would increase and “might give us a wake-up call,” Ryan said.

“If Congress is being lulled, they shouldn’t be lulled,” Bernanke responded.

That led to a discussion of fiscal policy, an area where Bernanke and Ryan found some common ground.

Even after the economy recovers, the United States “will still face a sizable structural budget gap if current budget policies continue,” Bernanke said.

“Over the longer term, the current trajectory of federal debt threatens to crowd out private capital formation and thus reduce productivity growth,” the Fed chairman added.

A growing share of the federal budget would go toward interest payments, he said, and high levels of debt would impair the ability of policymakers to respond to future economic shocks.

The Fed chairman said he supports “going big” on debt reduction over the next decade. But even if the federal government’s debt is reduced by up to $6 trillion over the next decade, the country will face even bigger problems in the following decades as the cost of entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare soar.

“The elephant in the room, really, is health care costs,” Bernanke said.

That must have pleased Ryan, whose plan to curtail those costs by reforming Medicare led one liberal group to run television commercials showing him pushing grandma off a cliff.

Nobody thinks Bernanke wants to push grandma off a cliff. He’s just keeping the money she earns from her fixed-income investments at near-zero rates.

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Kent Hoover is the Washington bureau chief for bizjournals.