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. …

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

… 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. …

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….

… 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.

… 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. …