Trump Voters Suffer More Pain At The Pump Than Democrats. A New Gas Proposal Could Make It Worse

Gas prices don't check your voter registration before they hit your wallet, but this piece wants you to believe rural, red-state drivers are somehow catching a worse deal than everyone else. Maybe there's something to that geographically, longer commutes, fewer transit options, older vehicles. Fine. But the bigger story buried in that headline is the "new gas proposal" part, and that's where the real irritation lives.

Every time Washington cooks up a fix for energy costs, it seems to arrive with a side of rent-seeking. Somebody's favored industry gets a subsidy, somebody's preferred fuel blend gets a mandate, and somewhere down the line the guy filling up his truck outside Tulsa gets to pay for it. That's not an accident of policy, it's the design. Special interests don't lobby for complexity because they love bureaucracy. They lobby for it because complexity is where the profit margin hides.

The people writing these proposals rarely drive the distances the proposals affect. They're not doing sixty miles each way to a job site, and they're not the ones deciding between groceries and a full tank. So when a "solution" to high gas prices ends up raising costs further, it's worth asking who actually asked for it, and who's cashing the check.

We'd have more patience for creative energy policy if it came from people who understood that a gallon of gas isn't an abstraction. It's rent, it's groceries, it's whether you make it to your kid's game on time. Fix that problem by producing more, not by dressing up another handout as reform.