Dem
51
Ties
3
GOP
46
The Watson School of International and Public Affairs at Brown University put together a tracker that calculates exactly how much money the Iran War has cost Americans in terms of higher fuel prices. And this weekend, the counter crossed an inauspicious threshold: Total excess fuel costs are now north of $100 billion. That's about $55.1 billion in increased gasoline costs and about $45.5 billion in increased diesel costs (which are sometimes borne directly by consumers, but are mostly passed down along the supply chain, as a result of increased shipping and transport costs). This $100 billion works out to almost $770 per household.
There are, of course, many households that won't much feel an extra $770 in costs. But the majority most certainly will, especially since those extra costs have been imposed over a period of about 6 months. For most folks, it's hard to miss extra expenses of $100+/month, especially when more than half of that comes in the form of increased gas costs, which might be the most noticeable economic indicator in American society.
And speaking of increased gas costs, the price per gallon this weekend, which averaged $4.15 nationwide, set a record for the Labor Day weekend. In fact, the national average has never been above $4/gallon on Labor Day; the previous high was $3.82/gallon, set way back in 2012.
As we have pointed out many times, this kind of comparison is somewhat misleading, because it fails to account for inflation. In truth, $3.82 in 2012 was the equivalent of about $5.50 today. Still, we would say that this weekend's high fuel prices are very bad news for the party in power, for three reasons. The first is that we're getting very close to Election Day, which means that voters' feelings about fuel prices are about to get baked in (if they aren't baked in already), and nothing can happen to change that. The second is that crossing a round-number barrier (e.g., $4.00/gallon) sticks in the mind. And the third is that the trendline is bad. Gas was an average of $3.20/gallon one year ago, and it was an average of $2.98/gallon when the Iran War started.
If voters perceive not only that gas prices are high, but also that they are headed in the wrong direction, that's poison for the party in power. Meanwhile, the Democrats might just mention, once or twice, that "Trump's War" took $100 billion out of the pockets of American families. It would be difficult, to be frank, to write a more disastrous script for an election year. The attack on Iran was obviously ill-conceived and poorly planned, both from a tactical standpoint and a political standpoint, and we and everyone else wrote that when it happened. Seriously, here is the piece we published on the day after the attack, in which both we and the readers excoriated the White House. Here is what we wrote the next day, and here and here are lengthy pieces we wrote a week later, after some of the dust had settled, and there had been time to reflect. The theme that runs through all four pieces is: This war makes absolutely no sense.
Now, a shade over 6 months later, the legion of critics has been proven correct, and then some. The only question—and we honestly don't know the answer—is whether Donald Trump realizes it, and if he would take a mulligan right now, if he could have one. Unfortunately for him, war is not golf—you can't cheat your way out of your mistakes, and you can't guarantee you'll win by holding the event at a venue that you own. (Z)