A dollar more a gallon: who really pays?

The New York Post reports a plain and painful number: $4.12 per gallon at the national average, nearly a dollar above where it stood one year ago. Treasury Secretary Bessent, the story tells us, points toward Ukraine's strikes on Russian energy infrastructure as a contributing cause. I will not dispute the diplomacy or the strategy — foreign entanglements were complicated enough in my own time, and I have no recollection of the particulars of this war. But I know how to read a ledger, and this one is written in the ink of ordinary people's wages.

A dollar a gallon may sound modest to a person who has never watched every penny. To a tradesman driving forty miles to a job site, a farmer hauling produce to market, or a home-health worker crossing a county to reach a patient, that dollar multiplies into twenty or thirty dollars a week — six weeks' worth of groceries lost to the pump over the course of a year. The cost of distant conflict is never paid only by soldiers and diplomats; it is spread, silently and without consent, across every household that burns fuel.

This is the oldest trick of inflation: it taxes without a vote. In my own day I wrote that paper money badly secured is a slow theft from those who hold it. Energy prices work the same mischief by a different mechanism — they are, in effect, an invisible surcharge on everything that moves: food, medicine, timber, cloth. The price at the pump is only the most legible line on a much longer bill.

Secretary Bessent's framing — that Ukraine wants to blow up Russian energy assets — may or may not be a fair characterization of allied war aims; I mark that judgment as inference, not recollection, since I cannot know the full diplomatic record. What I can say is that any administration that names a cause of high prices owes the public, in the same breath, a plain account of what it intends to do about those prices and how long the working household must bear the burden while policy catches up.

I was postmaster enough to know that the cost of carrying a letter was never merely the postmaster's problem — it shaped who could afford to do business at all, and who was effectively silenced by expense. The cost of fuel is today's postage on commerce itself. A republic that leaves its working citizens to absorb an indefinite energy surcharge, with no timetable and no relief, is spending their savings without their appropriation.

The counsel a working person can act on: Track your fuel spending as its own line in your household budget — not buried in 'transportation,' but named plainly. When you see what you actually spend in a month, you can make deliberate choices: combining errands, adjusting the commute, pushing back on an employer about remote days. Visibility is the beginning of thrift. You cannot manage what you have not measured.