OPINION: Rising Fuel Prices and Inflation Dampen the Christmas Spirit

By John F. Di Leo, Opinion Contributor

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.

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