Posted on 11/17/2023 3:08:16 PM PST by jfd1776
As we enter the Christmas season in earnest, with decorating, gift shopping, and other seasonal activities keeping us busy, we cannot help but notice the unprecedented level of inflation everywhere we go.
There are several reasons for these three years of price hikes, of course. It’s not all caused entirely by a single issue. But there is one major cause that outshines the rest: the cost of diesel fuel.
What, you don’t buy diesel, yourself? You don’t have to.
In many ways, the American economy itself runs on diesel fuel.
Transportation costs – inbound and outbound, raw materials and finished products, from LTL to truckload, from small parcel to diesel locomotive – play a huge role in the pricing process.
Transportation looms large in American manufacturing, in wholesale distribution, and in most retail businesses too, large and small. The cost of truck and rail movement therefore plays an outsized role in the pricing of virtually everything we make or buy. Before the worker on the assembly line can assemble the product, before the warehouseman can stock it upon arrival or pick it for fulfillment, before the shop clerk or grocery store cashier can ring it up for you, it had to travel from origin to destination.
In fact, most products ride a truck many times from their birth to their final delivery, as the raw materials are transferred from mine or forest to and through the many factories performing each of several stages of manufacturing. Are those many truck or rail rides cheap or costly? And is anyone in Washington working to try to keep them cheap for you?
Broad inflation has justified huge increases in rents, employee salaries, and employee benefits. So too must trucking companies have to pay more for their trucks, their terminals, their employees. As with most industries, this rampaging inflation makes these portions of the issue a “chicken or the egg” argument: do we need to pay our drivers and tractor-trailer dealers more because of inflation, or do we have to raise our own transportation prices to cover the additional amount we must now pay our drivers and truck manufacturers? It’s a hard call, even for some economists.
But the fuel itself faces no such challenge. The fuel part is obvious, and almost independent of all of the above. While publicly traded in the free market, fuel prices are really are set almost entirely by the federal government now, because federal executive orders (and other governmental decisions) determine for the oil companies whether it’s a sensible time to keep drilling and producing petroleum or not. And the oil companies all set their prices, necessarily, on that question.
For the past few years, the price of fuel has represented about half the price of transportation, so as fuel prices climb, so does the cost of almost everything we buy.
We all know most of these numbers off the top of our heads, because diesel has risen or fallen roughly along with gasoline prices.
In 2020, the final year of the Trump administration, the national average diesel fuel price was $2.55 per gallon. It started climbing immediately after the election, and as soon as the Biden-Harris regime was installed at the beginning of 2021, this new team started taking measures to intentionally drive up the prices of all forms of fuel, especially gasoline and diesel.
Here’s the officially reported diesel price history since the beginning of the Biden-Harris regime’s assault on the energy industry.
What did this do to us? It was a headlong assault on the availability of oil by our own government.
The Biden-Harris campaign literally promised in 2020 that if elected, they would attack the oil industry, and they kept that promise, starting with a stack of executive orders on Day One.
The Biden-Harris regime has declared millions of acres of federal lands off limits to drilling licenses. In addition to that, for the areas they have not banned from drilling, the regime has let it be known that they would slow-walk applications for such licenses. Taken together, the result is exactly what one would expect: the oil industry has largely given up on the United States for exploration and licensing. The industry will drill elsewhere in the world, making money for the islamist nations of the middle east or other primarily unfriendly countries.
As if all that wasn’t enough, the Biden-Harris regime has mandated that automakers accelerate their switchover to the unproven, still-dangerous and unaffordable technology of electric-battery-powered vehicles. They even shut down an almost-finished pipeline to move Canadian oil to the Gulf of Mexico, to further send the signal to the world that this government will do everything it possibly can to starve the economy of the fuel it needs.
Economies suffer almost constant hits; they always have. Weather affects agriculture; wars affect international trade. Population changes affect manufacturing and retail employment. Not every hit to an economy can be blamed on one’s government.
But this one is different. The skyrocketing rate of energy prices and concurrent reduction of energy supply since January 2021, particularly diesel and gasoline, have been completely intentional, and clearly tracks the constant assaults by the Biden-Harris regime.
This destructive force, turbocharging the nation’s general inflation rate as it necessarily accelerates the price of most business and consumer goods, is the result of specific, intentional government policies.
The Biden-Harris regime has done all this to us on purpose.
And that makes all the difference.
Copyright 2023 John F. Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based trade compliance trainer and transportation manager, writer, and actor. County chairman of the Milwaukee County Republican Party in the 1990s, after serving as president of the Ethnic American Council in the 1980s, he has been writing regularly for Illinois Review since 2009. Follow John F. Di Leo on Facebook, Twitter, Gettr or TruthSocial.
A collection of John’s Illinois Review articles about vote fraud, The Tales of Little Pavel, and his 2021 political satires about current events, Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes One and Two, and the newly published Volume Three (as of Nov 12, 2023) are all available, in either paperback or eBook, only on Amazon.
Interesting because here in NH, gas has been dropping steadily for a month now and in some places is about $3 /gallon.
Other places are higher.
True, fuel prices are down from their peak at the moment.
But my point in writing the column was that Biden Harris policies have caused fuel prices, both gasoline and diesel, (and jet fuel, and other Petroleum byproducts as well, of course) to trend far higher than they needed to be throughout this regime.
Over the past three years, petroleum fuels have averaged 1 1/2 times the price they averaged during the Trump administration… Reaching as much as double at some points, particularly in 2022.
(feel free to go to the original link in Illinois Review. In the original column, I included the hyperlinks to my sources, the federal US energy information agency, and some more readable reports from SMC3).
These consistently high levels of fuel prices are reflected in the price of every product we buy…. From food to clothing, from Christmas presents to day-to-day necessities.
Gas prices are actually falling in nw Arkansas. Three months ago, the price was around $3.30/gal.
Today it varies from $2.55 to $2.89.
Im actually not seeing fuel prices rise. Bought it today at 2.94 a gallon at Sam’s Club.
Now food and basically everything else?,,,fuhgeddaboutit! It’s rising faster than I can remember.
https://media.giphy.com/media/3oz8xQ1nYHJF9lKjtK/giphy.gif
Yes, overall, they are up since President Trump was in office. And diesel has yet to come down.
We’re waiting for that as home heating oil will also drop as well.
As I predicted when Biden came in.
Gas goes way up, insults and regulations hurt the oil industry and we depend on foreign oil (and lost the pipeline being constructed). Then prices for gas quickly go up.
But then then go down, but NOT to the Trump prices. People all elbow each other and say “Gas is down to $3.59 at Mason and Anders.” “Well I saw it at $3.29 at Baines and Main.”
And they used to pay $1.83 when Trump was forced out of office.
Exactly like the retail stores. I knew a woman who worked part time every year before the major sales in the biggest department store. At 1-6 am the workers would cut off the low price tags the items had, then would put on higher prices that would be lowered by the new sale starting shortly.
People would excitedly buy the $70 sheets on sale that the tags said were $100 marked down, but the day before they could have bought them for $55.
That level of deceit sickens me.
I think the Hamas terrorist attacks on Christmas will put a bigger damper on the Christmas spirit. What better time for the muslims to declare their war when they see so many marching in the streets for their cult of death and destruction.
I think prices will stay down thru next years election...then, bar the door!
Agreed
Gas and diesel are down this month in GA. $3.75 for diesel and $2.68 for regular unleaded.
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