Harger: Our leaders say they love this economy. Try affording it at $5.56 a gallon

Around here, they say a single adult needs $135,000 a year to live comfortably. One person. No kids. That ranks Seattle as the sixth-highest among any metro in America.

Now hold that against another number. Across the same Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue area, the median household income is about $112,000. That’s every paycheck in the house combined.

The typical family earns less than what one person is supposed to need.

So when Wednesday’s inflation report landed, more than half this region felt it somewhere real. 4.2% inflation, fastest in three years. Gasoline is up 40% nationally. Energy alone drove more than 60% of last month’s increase.

And the headline number hides the worst of it. Say you got a 3% raise last year. I don’t know many people who did, but say you did. With inflation at 4.2%, you took a pay cut. You worked the same hours, probably more, and the check buys less than it did a year ago.

The economy keeps getting described as resilient. Resilient for whom? Wall Street at record highs. On paper, everything holds. At the kitchen table, more people slip behind every month, raise or no raise.

‘I love the inflation’: what leaders say v. what families feel

The same day those numbers came out, reporters asked President Trump about the inflation. His answer: “You know what I really love? I love the inflation.”

He claimed it would drop like a rock once the war ends. The Speaker of the House rushed out to say the quote was taken out of context.

Fine. Here’s the context. A wealthy man looked at the worst inflation in three years and saw a number on a chart that would improve later. For him, 4.2% really is nothing. He can weather this storm. He’s never done a paycheck-to-paycheck budget, never watched the pump tick past $60 and felt his stomach drop, never stood in a checkout line choosing the half cart over the full one. The number that’s a rounding error to him is the whole month to everyone else.

And nobody gets to sort this into team jerseys. Remember 2021 and 2022. Inflation was tearing through 7%, 8%, 9%, and the Biden White House told us it was “transitory.” Then they branded it “Bidenomics” and toured the country, insisting the economy was historically great while your grocery receipt said otherwise. “It’ll come down eventually” and “transitory” are the same sentence. Both translate to: your problem is temporary, so it isn’t a problem.

So this is bigger than one party. Washington, D.C. dismisses your squeeze with a smirk. Olympia dismisses it with a statute.

Washington is one of the worst states in America for a summer trip

When money gets tight, the summer trip is the first thing to go. And here, it goes first and hardest.

A new Dunhill road trip study ranked all 48 contiguous states on summer travel costs. Washington came in 44th, near the bottom. The reason sits right at the pump: regular gas averages $5.56 a gallon here, third-highest in the nation, per AAA, while everyday costs run 7% above the national average.

I know how that math feels because I lived it. Growing up, there were a couple of years in elementary school when it was food banks and food stamps, and the heat turned low in winter to save money. We didn’t take vacations.

I’ve done all right since then, worked my way into the upper-middle class, and I’m grateful for it every day. But that climb is exactly why I’ll say this to the neighbors who assume everyone around them is fine. A lot of them aren’t. The family in the nice-enough house with two incomes and a car payment can still lie awake over a gas bill and a rent letter. The struggle didn’t vanish at some income line. It just got quieter. And $5.56 gas finds those people too.

Why is gas $5.56 in Washington? The war, the refineries, and the stack

A lot of this is the war. When the conflict with Iran shut down the Strait of Hormuz, it choked off a fifth of the world’s oil overnight. The IEA calls it the largest supply disruption in the history of the oil market. Not one of the largest. The largest.

Prices didn’t climb. They detonated. Oil shot past $90 a barrel. An April ceasefire cracked this week, with the US, Israel, and Iran trading their heaviest strikes in months. The Strait is effectively blocked, and every fill-up in America carries that uncertainty baked in.

Nobody in Olympia closed that Strait. Every driver in every state is paying the war premium right now.

But the war hits Oklahoma too. Gas there is $3.60.

Part of our gap is real geography. The West Coast is its own fuel island, cut off from the big refineries on the Gulf Coast, running special clean-air blends almost nobody else makes, and losing refineries one by one as old plants shut down. That keeps our prices structurally higher than most of the country. I’ve had energy experts on the air explain exactly this, and they’re right.

But the island doesn’t explain the whole gap. Stacked on top of that already-high base is what Olympia controls directly: the nation’s third-highest state gas tax at 55.4 cents, the federal 18.4 cents, and the Climate Commitment Act (CCA) carbon cost, which industry analysts estimate adds roughly 60 cents more per gallon.

We can’t vote our way off the West Coast. We can vote on what the state piles on top. And the state keeps choosing more.

The gas tax goes up July 1. The system behind it is broken

On July 1, less than three weeks from today, the state tax ticks up again. About a penny this year, to roughly 56.5 cents. A penny sounds like nothing. The catch is the autopilot behind it. The Legislature tied the gas tax to inflation, so it rises on its own every year, and rises fastest in the very years inflation is already squeezing you. No vote required. Ever.

The penny is the small story. The big one is that Washington’s tax system is broken. Not strained. Not imperfect. Broken. It grew by accident; one panic, one court order, and one ballot fight at a time, layer upon layer, and nobody ever sat down to design the whole thing on purpose. Now the plan is to bolt a new income tax onto that same busted frame. The smarter move is a reset: reasonable people from both parties at one table, building something fair and coherent from the ground up.

And yes, roads cost money. Nobody’s arguing for free highways. But decades of some of the highest pump prices in America bought us roads rated good just 37 percent of the time, near the bottom of the country. Premium prices, pothole product.

The squeeze only gets tighter from here

Here’s where this goes if we stay the course. The war could wind down, and the price spike it caused could fade with it. But don’t mistake that for relief. Prices aren’t drifting back to some comfortable normal, because that normal is gone. Inflation doesn’t run in reverse. It slows down, or it speeds up, and either way, the cost of everything keeps grinding higher: groceries, rent, insurance, a fill-up. The baseline only moves in one direction.

And Washington pours fuel on that fire. The CCA stays. The gas tax is pinned to inflation, so it climbs hardest in the very years families are already drowning, by statute, on purpose. The one big cost the state fully controls is built to rise at the worst possible moment and never come back down. Then those high fuel prices ride into every grocery, every delivery, every gallon a contractor burns, which means our own policy keeps feeding the squeeze it claims to regret.

So the storm clears for the wealthy man with the full tank, and never quite clears for the family doing gas-station math on a Tuesday. Same state. Same prices. Completely different soaking.

This summer, somewhere in Washington, a family looks at $5.56 a gallon and decides the day trip to Ocean Shores can wait. It’s a tank of gas there and back. The kids can run through the sprinkler instead.

And the screw keeps turning. Every year, the tax climbs with inflation. Every month, the rent and the groceries climb too. The paycheck doesn’t. Each turn, a few more families cross from getting by to going under.

And the line they’re crossing is the one we started with. $135,000 for one person to live comfortably here. $112,000 for the typical household. Most people are already on the wrong side of it, and the line moves further out of reach every year.

You can only turn a screw so many times before something gives. A cost of living near the highest in America, climbing every year and shoved higher by the state’s own hand, runs out of people who can carry it. Washington hasn’t reached that point yet. It gets closer every July.

Charlie Harger is the host of “Seattle’s Morning News” on KIRO Newsradio. You can read more of his stories and commentaries here. Follow Charlie on X and email him here. 

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