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| Inflation Calculators from InflationData.com |
Hillare Belloc’s Advice to the Rich: “Get to know something about the internal combustion engine. And
remember -- soon you will die.”
To what should we attribute the steep rise in gas prices?
A Hartford paper noted Connecticut’s “double-digit spike” in
gas prices under the headline “Pain at the pump.”
Gas prices were far less painful under the administration of
former President Donald – “drill baby, drill” -- Trump, now beleaguered with
multiple court actions, none of them accusing Trump of a border policy that has
ushered into the United States millions of illegal aliens, or imprudent “taxes
on the rich and the middleclass.
The Poynter Institute’s
Politifact reported in December
2023, “Federal Energy Information Administration data shows that the average
gasoline price during Trump’s four-year term was $2.46 per gallon. During President
Joe Biden’s presidency so far, the average [gas price] has been $3.54…
GasBuddy.com data shows that about 99.2% of U.S. gas stations are selling
gasoline for less than $5 per gallon.
A recent story in the Hartford paper notes, “Gas prices in
Connecticut jumped nearly 30 cents a gallon in the last month -- 20 cents in
the last week alone – little more than a month away from the long Memorial Day
holiday, the traditional start of the summer driving season... The average
price of a gallon of regular gas in Connecticut,” according to the paper, “was
$3.71” as of Wednesday , April 24.
Gas prices under Trump were low, among other reasons,
because Trump’s energy policy was devoted to decreasing the price of energy by
increasing its supply.
GasBuddy, a site that tracks the ups and downs of national
average gasoline prices, is projecting that the price at the pump could soon
hit $4.10 per gallon. By May, the average price may reach $4.25 per gallon,
likely remaining above $4 until at least November.
When the supply of a product or service increases, its price
decreases. When the supply of a product or service decreases, its price
increases, according to the law of supply and demand. This law is enforced by
what Adam Smith called the “invisible hand” of a private free market place.
Decreases in the supply of relatively clean natural gas have increased because
the supply of the product has been reduced by a very visible hand of an
ideological driven administration that wishes to punish energy producers that
do not depend upon solar or wind production.
A glut in oil supply, assuming taxes and demand remain
stable, will result in a reduced cost at the pump. Taxes also add to the price
of gas and, in Connecticut, gas is taxed at the port of arrival and again at
the pump. When state government wished to bring down the price of gas at the
pump, it did so by eliminating the port tax – temporarily. The taxes placed in
Connecticut on the wholesale price of gasoline are multi-layered: per gallon the federal
excise is 18.4 cents, the state excise tax is 25 cents, and the Petroleum Gross
Receipts Earning Tax is about 27 cents.
Naturally, the higher the price of gasoline, the greater the
taxes collected by state and federal governments, perhaps the only institutions
in the Unites States that are not offended by high gas prices -- because they
swell government treasuries.
What Biden and his slew of neo-progressives in Connecticut
know about the economy couldn’t fill a thimble. And they know as little about
battery powered vehicles, prohibitively expensive and unloved by the buying
public.
The price of gas is high, and will remain so, because the
Biden administration and its wealthy political promoters among Connecticut’s
rich, comfortably situated in toney Greenwich Connecticut, Governor Ned Lamont
and U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal’s lairs, have not taken Belloc’s advice
seriously -- “Get to know something about the internal combustion engine. And
remember – soon, you will die.”
Though some of our immortals believe, not without reason,
they will die with their political spurs on, immortality is a rarity rather
than an exception in politics. Rich, middleclass or poor, we shall soon die,
some of us knowing little about the internal combustion engine. Belloc’s point
is that riches are an insulation that protects those who are not kings of the
earth from the cruel “winds and hurricanoes” raking the heath upon which King
Lear, chastised by poverty, declares, “Learn to feel what wretches feel, that
thou may’st shake the superflux to them, and show the
heavens more just.”
One of the problems with politics in the USA is that lordly
politicians, dreaming they are immortal and above the laws of nature and
nature’s God, rarely suppose they will ever meet a judge more severe that any
of the conservative/progressive members of the U.S. Supreme Court.
They are wrong.
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