Drivers are frustrated these days, as the price at the pump has again jumped. Illinois has regular unleaded around $5.00/gallon as I write this, with nearby red states not too far behind, and only the lunatic asylums like California exceeding that level.
Surprisingly, as painful as this is, it’s not actually record territory. Four years ago, in the second year of the Biden-Harris regime, gasoline price averages were even higher than they are now. And the comparison is even worse when you adjust for the severe inflation of the Biden-Harris years. Inflation-adjusted rates are still (at this writing) well below where they were during the Biden-era peak.
But that’s not to minimize it. The fuel we put in our cars is rarely an optional purchase; we have to drive to work, drive our children to school, carpool to sports or theatre practice. We sometimes use our vehicles for work, as sales reps, delivery services or ride-share hosts.
American lives are dependent upon flexible, dependable transportation; when this cost skyrockets, it hits us harder than most other forms of price inflation.
If beef goes up, you can switch to pork. If prepared meals go up, you can switch to home cooking. There’s a relatively manageable money-saving switch for many of the costs affected by inflation.
Gasoline just isn’t among them.
The immediate pain has an obvious cause: the global price of oil is temporarily inflated due to the war in Iran. For political reasons, those who oppose the war, from politicians to pundits, from economists to “the man on the street,” are jumping on the opportunity to cast shade on the Trump administration for our increased gasoline prices.
The question isn’t whether that’s fair or not. Perhaps the timing of the Iran war was avoidable, perhaps it wasn’t. Perhaps we’re doing the best possible job prosecuting this war, perhaps there’s a better way. There’s no perfect time for military action.
But we should take a moment to consider the other causes for the high price of gasoline, because the war with Iran’s tyrannical Twelver regime isn’t the only cause.
- It’s May. This is the time of year when refineries are required by law to switch from “the winter blends” to “the summer blends.” Why? Because the EPA forces them to. There’s no Constitutional basis for this, but nevertheless, the federal government has been forcing many of America’s refineries, and therefore thousands upon thousands of America’s gas stations, to manage a painful and expensive swap twice a year. The change in fuels doesn’t help our cars get better mileage, or better handling, or better longevity; it just makes our gasoine cost more.
- It’s taxes. In addition to federal taxes charged at the pump, many states have a percentage-based gasoline tax, much like other better-known percentage-based taxes, such as income tax, payroll tax, and sales tax. The higher the price of gasoline, the more these states tax it. One price increase automatically generates another.
- It’s refining capacity. In 1960, when the USA had a population of 180 million, we had about 310 petroleum refineries to serve them. Today, with a population of about 340 million, we are down to 132 refineries. We desperately need more refineries, not fewer, to bring stability to our energy supply.
This isn’t to say that the war with Iran is irrelevant. It is certainly among the drivers of current price increases in gasoline, diesel, and other petroleum-based fuels.
But it is important to note that, even though the war is responsible for part of the spike, the war isn’t fully responsible for the prices in general.
If our government hadn’t spent the past few generations practically regulating oil drilling and refining right out of existence, if federal, and especially state, governments didn’t keep piling on more and more taxes, year after year, and if the EPA didn’t add the wasteful cost of complete product changeovers twice a year, the base level of our fuel would be far less expensive.
Again, this isn’t to say the price wouldn’t still go up in wartime. But if it were going up from a low rate, that would be infinitely less painful than seeing prices climb from an unnecessarily high base.
It’s easy to feel pain at the pump and respond with a knee-jerk reaction of blaming the government’s choices in wartime…
…but it would be infinitely more honest to blame the generational bad choices of our governments in peacetime.
For far too long, far too many jurisdictions and bureaucracies focus year-round on how to wring the most tax revenue out of the moment.
It’s high time we demanded that our governments recognize that, someday, there will be wars, there will be hurricanes, there will be earthquakes, and we need fuel prices to be low enough that the disaster increases that result from such events don’t bury the country.
We could handle a 50% wartime increase in the cost of fuel, if the peacetime cost of fuel weren’t already shamefully padded with the avoidable burdens of intrusive government at every level.
Copyright 2026 John F. Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation and trade compliance trainer, speaker, and consultant. A President of the Ethnic American Council in the 1980s and Chairman of the Milwaukee County Republican Party in the 1990s, his book on vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel), his political satires on the Biden-Harris administration (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I, II, and III), and his first nonfiction book, “Current Events and the Issues of Our Age,” are all available in either eBook or paperback, only on Amazon. His trade compliance training practice is available either in person or by webinar.
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