America's Gas-Chamber: The Price You Pay (part 1)

The price of gasoline is once again a political landmine. Trump’s war with Iran has awoken the public from its obsessive daydreaming about the Epstein files or other distracting issues which impact their personal lives in minor to negligible ways. [Note: This doesn’t mean that there aren’t substantive and meaningful aspects to those issues to be dealt with, but that their direct impact on your life is dubious.] The price of gasoline (and other petroleum derived products) however does have direct and indirect immediate impacts upon you. If you don’t agree then you are not smelling the gas fumes polluting almost every part of your life. There is the news media reporting on the rising price of gasoline daily, if not hourly. The financial gurus and experts are assessing and predicting the consequences on businesses, the economy, the nation, and the world. Politicians and political parties are pumping their versions of reality along with offering their views on who you should be blaming. Meanwhile, you are paying the price regardless of what you are being told, what you believe, what is true, or understanding how this cost is and will actually affect you. Yes, you are paying more, but there is more to it than just understanding that.

I am sure that most people understand that the increased price of gas is having of will have consequences for them. It’s just that those consequences come through a variety of factors. There are different grades of consequences to the price of gasoline and how it impacts you. The price of gasoline’s impact is much more complicated than just gas costing more. So, let’s step through some of the impacts that create the complexity and chaos of the price of gasoline on you.

As a starting point, it would be useful to put the price of gasoline into a context that relates to you and your reality instead of just to “what is the cost of gas today”. To that end, here are some simple and basic reference pieces of information.

A.       What is the price of gasoline today? Well, the average price of gas (regular) as of 3-22-26 is $3.94 per gallon. Gas prices range from $5.74 to $3.26 per gallon based on state averages. This is over a 34% increase from just one month ago.

B.       Gasoline was approximately 3.1% of consumer spending in Feb. 2026. A 34% increase would raise that to 4.17%.

C.      The average spending on gasoline was $2,083 to $2,250 in 2025. This cost would amount to $2,791 to $3,015 under the 34% price up-tick from the Iran war if the price persisted through the year. This estimate would require somewhere between approx. $700 to $765 in additional spending on gasoline for each household.

D.      The impact of that additional cost depends upon your household’s budget. All you need to do is consider how that cost would affect household for the:

·  bottom 20% with average income =                      $  19,290 is a 3.6% to 4.0% hit

·  21% to 40% with average households’ income =  $  51,600 is a 1.36% to 1.48% hit

·  middle 20% with average household incomes =   $  88,190 is a 0.79% to 0.87% hit

·  61% to 80% with average households' income =  $142,960 is a 0.49% to 0.54% hit

·  81% to 100% with average household incomes = $330,325 is a 0.21% to 0.213 hit

Now what does this mean?

Well for one thing, it means that not only does the price of gas have an impact but that that impact is highly disproportionate depending on what your income level is. This isn’t or shouldn’t be surprising. However, the important point isn’t that price increases may be more difficult on some than on others which is obvious. Rather, what’s important is understanding how that difficulty translates into the other impacts on people, even to those who may not even notice the increased price of gasoline.

For example, in the lowest quintile, 15.6% of income is spent on food. The increased cost of gasoline has to come from somewhere and food is one option but usually a bad one. 4.0% is 25% of that food budget. There are of course other costs. Housing is 41.3%, healthcare is 10.5%, and 14.5% for transportation (FYI, which you can’t take the increase from). That’s 81.9% of the income and there are still other categories that need to be covered. Taking 3.6% to 4.0% more from the pie just puts pressure on what is actually affordable for individuals in this quintile. That doesn’t mean that it isn’t a problem for the next one or two quintiles, it is just different.

Now if this was the only consequence of the increased cost of gasoline that would be a proper understanding of how big the problem is; but remember the problem is not that simple. It will be necessary to take another step toward where the gasoline problem spills into other domains.