Diesel at $6.50 Is a Tax on Dinner, and Nobody Will Own It

Diesel is above $6.50 a gallon as West Michigan farmers head into harvest, and I haven't heard a single official say who is responsible for doing something about it. No plan, no timeline, no name. Just the number and a shrug. I don't buy that this is somebody else's department.

Let's be plain about what that number is. Diesel isn't a niche fuel. It runs the combine, the grain truck, the refrigerated trailer, and the delivery route. Our own coverage this week notes that higher diesel and jet fuel costs are already straining shipping and retail planning. So when I read $6.50, I don't read a farm story. I read a grocery bill that hasn't been printed yet.

Harvest doesn't wait for prices to get friendly. The crop is ready when it's ready. The farmer eats the fuel cost or passes it to a buyer, who passes it to a shipper, who passes it to a retailer, who passes it to the one person in the chain with nobody left to hand it to. That's the family standing at the register doing math. Every link in the chain gets to pass the cost along except the last one.

Now stack the rest of this week on top of it. Hiring slowed. Unemployment ticked up to 4.2%. Employers added fewer jobs than expected. The Fed hiked rates to fight inflation, and we're told Warsh's next decision will test the Fed's independence. Inflation is a real thief, and I won't pretend a rate hike is wrong in every case. But look at the shape of it. Costs go up, job openings soften, and the medicine makes borrowing more expensive. Independence is fine. An independent institution still has to answer for what its decisions do to people who had no vote in them.

Then there's the Medicare news: $90 premium rebates for millions of seniors. I'm not going to sneer at money reaching people on fixed incomes. Take it, and I mean that. But a $90 rebate is a headline you can announce in an afternoon. Diesel at $6.50 is a bill that shows up every week, in every cart, and seniors buy groceries hauled by the same trucks as everyone else. If the rebate is meant to offset what's happening to prices, somebody should do that arithmetic in public and show their work.

I run a food pantry, so my view of this is not abstract. Getting food from a field to a family is a chain of trucks, warehouses, and volunteers' gas tanks, and every link burns fuel. The people at the end of that chain are the ones with the least slack. When the cost of moving food climbs, they feel it first and hardest, and they can't negotiate it down. Compassion in this country has to include noticing when the pipe feeding the poor gets more expensive.

So run it through the four questions I ask of anyone who brings me a problem. What happened? Diesel is above $6.50. Why? I haven't seen a straight answer from anyone with the power to act. Who owns the next step? Nobody has raised a hand. When will it be resolved? Silence. I can take bad news. If someone with authority said this will last through the winter, farmers, haulers, and pantries could plan around it. What I can't work with is evasiveness, and that's what we're getting.

The White House just launched a website on the real cost of socialism. Fine, every party likes a website. I'd like one on the real cost of diesel. And before the other side gets comfortable, I haven't heard a plan from the Democrats' midterm messaging either. Both parties are busy telling you what the other one will wreck. Neither has a line about what you're paying to move a bushel of corn to a store.

This reaches down to the local level too. Every village and township that plows snow runs on the same fuel, and winter is coming. If your road budget was written on last year's diesel price, it's wrong, and the people who wrote it should say so before February, not after the salt runs out. Government is a tool, and a tool that isn't planning for its own fuel bill is not being run by anyone paying attention.

What I'd want is not complicated. A straight answer on why this is happening. A name for each lever, state and federal, and a plain statement of which ones will be pulled and which won't. And no panic handout steered to whoever has the best lobbyist, because the people who get hurt here don't have one. I'm not asking for a miracle. I'm asking for what I'd ask of any employee who handed me a problem like this: tell me what happened, why, who owns it, and when it'll be fixed. Until someone does, $6.50 is just the price of everyone's silence.