+1 for anything by Mankiw. We read several of his books when I was studying Econ in college a few years ago. Given your interest in inflation, government spending, etc, you'll want to focus on the chapters on Macroeconomics. I also found a good presentation from the Berkeley website that might be interesting:

http://emlab.berkeley.edu/users/webfac/wood/e100b_f08/intro....