Pain at the Pump

Dear Friend,

When I went to fill up my truck last weekend, I paid over $3.80 a gallon. That’s almost unheard of in Northwest Missouri. The record high average gas price just down the road in St. Joseph is just $3.89 a gallon.

The bad part is, we’ve been relatively fortunate here in North Missouri. Across the country, gas prices are average $4.27 a gallon today. If you happen to live in Northeast Missouri and have to travel across the river to Illinois, make sure you fill up your tank before you cross the river. Gas is running over $4.50 a gallon in Illinois.

All of this is putting a hurting on families. It’s been hard enough to make ends meet with rising inflation, skyrocketing gas prices are making it almost impossible. This isn’t just impacting folks directly, but indirectly too. Virtually every link in the supply chain depends on fuel to get products to market and when fuel prices skyrocket like this, it impacts the price of virtually everything.

That’s especially true for farmers. A friend of mine over in Salisbury filled his one-ton feed truck up the other day and it cost him $300.

On top of that, prices for fertilizer, seed, and other inputs have skyrocketed with inflation as well. That’s created a lot of problems. Even though farmers are looking at record high prices for their products, the price of production has risen even higher, putting the squeeze on family farms everywhere.

The real shame is that all of this could have been avoided. Even though President Biden likes to blame Russia’s invasion of Ukraine for the high prices we’re seeing at the pump right now, prices were rising long before then. This isn’t a problem weeks in the making, it’s a problem years in the making.

On his first day in office, President Biden cancelled the Keystone XL Pipeline, which promised to bring in more crude oil from our ally Canada than we had been importing from Russia. That’s just one example. Left wing environmentalists and politicians have been obstructing pipeline and drilling projects for years—driving down oil production and driving up costs at the pump in the name of climate change.

Enough is enough. It doesn’t have to be this way. We can and should make America energy independent. Until we do, we’re going to keep feeling this pain at the pump.

Sincerely,

Sam Graves