Stop Sneering at People Worried About Gas Prices. The Working Class Is Bearing the Brunt | Opinion

You've probably noticed that gas prices are at a record high. According to data from AAA, the national average for a gallon of gas is $4.009—the highest since the 2008 financial crisis. This has real consequences for working people across the country. But you'd never know it based on how some liberal pundits are talking. To them, Americans should be happy to see gas prices rage even higher in exchange for feeling good about themselves when it comes to Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

"Complaining about gas prices? Have some perspective," the USA Today columnist Michael J. Stern tweeted over the weekend along with a photo of a bomb-ravaged town in Ukraine. "[W]atching cable news, and not just Fox, you would think the biggest story in the world right now is gas prices in the US" tweeted another journalist. "Low gas prices was a nice upside consequence of the cataclysmic 2020 economic meltdown where 20% of Americans had no job, all the stores were closed, and 380,000 of us died," was Senator Chris Murphy's way of gaslighting you out of noticing your gas bill. And last night, none other than the dean of the liberal commentariat himself, Stephen Colbert, addressed the topic with characteristic smug condescension. "A clean conscience is worth a buck or two," he said to roaring applause from his New York audience. "I'm willing to pay $4 a gallon. Hell, I'll pay $15 a gallon because I drive a Tesla!"

Bully for him. Most of us do not live in cities with great public transportation or drive the latest in fuel-efficient cars. The working-class people of this country—those who live in the dilapidated suburbs and exurbs of our cities and the rural hinterlands—are more likely to drive a beat-up old Chevy.

These are the people the Left used to care about. These are the people who will be hurt by rising fuel prices—who are being mocked by rich liberals.

Of course, I feel for the people of Ukraine. We should do what we can to defend them from Putin's aggression. But it does not undermine that sentiment to point out that it is the working class that is going to bear the burden of the rising gas prices being inflicted on them by elites in the political and chattering classes.

Higher gas prices disproportionately affect rural America and the working class. Back in 2008, at the height of the financial crisis, this was something that was widely reported on. In those halcyon days of yesteryear, the Left understood that the price of gas was a big determinant in whether American families could make ends meet. It was for this reason that then-candidate Barack Obama supported tapping the nation's strategic oil reserves, while his primary opponent, Hillary Clinton, proposed temporarily suspending the federal excise tax on gas.

Neither of these were necessarily popular with environmentalists or the urban elites of the Democratic base. But the candidates and many in the party understood they were necessary measures to alleviate immediate pain. It did not mean that we should not develop renewable energies or signal a doubling-down on fossil fuels. Rather, it was a way to meet the material needs of people in the here and now—something the Democrats used to prioritize.

Over the ensuing 14 years, the Democratic Party has lost touch with rural and working class Americans. This shows in the response of the liberal commentariat, all of whom are asking the most vulnerable among us to take it on the chin. For too many, though, rising gas prices are more like a punch in the gut.

30 percent of rural Americans commute 30 minutes one-way to and from work, which translates into more mileage than it does in the city. 4 percent of Americans—a not insignificant number of the 60 million rural Americans—commute more than 90 minutes. And they're not just commuting to work: Rural Americans live further from the nearest hospital and are more likely to say access to good healthcare locally is a problem.

This is not just a rural problem, though. Across the country, the poor and working class travel further for groceries, school, and work. Most cities outside New York and Chicago lack reliable public transportation, the result of America's car culture. While there is certainly a debate to be had about whether that's in our best interests going forward, it does nothing to address the immediate needs of the poor and working class in both rural America and cities like Seattle, where gentrification has increasingly priced the working class out of the city centers and into suburbs and exurbs.

To put into perspective just how dire these straits are, gas prices consume up to 20 percent of some household budgets. Unsurprisingly, Black, Hispanic, and Native American communities bear a disproportion burden. Meanwhile, real wages have been stagnant since the 1970s, with a 2018 dollar having the same purchasing power as a dollar in 1978. Even there, rural America lags behind urban and suburban America, with wage and salary growth in rural communities between 2010 and 2017 lagging behind cities and suburbs.

All of this conspires to mean rural Americans have lower overall incomes and therefore struggle to absorb the cost of rising gas prices more than urban dwellers, even though urban dwellers are more likely to live below the poverty line. And even then, many of them are pushed to the extremes of their metro areas, meaning they, too, are driving further than middle- and upper-class elites. Someone has to pour your lattes, pick up your trash, stock your shelves, and clean your offices. What happens when they can't afford to get to work?

The American people have to ask themselves this question, and they do not like the answer. This may explain why a Washington Post-ABC News poll two weeks ago found that 67 percent of Americans support sanctions—yet just a week later, another poll by the Washington Post found that number dropped to 51 percent "if sanctions led to higher energy prices in the United States."

It's worth mentioning that the U.S. working class did not start this war. Putin did. He's the bad guy here. Yet it is working class and poor people who are feeling the sting of America's morally righteous stand. Rather than derision, they deserve support: leaders and pundits who are interested in making this sacrifice easier to bear, not harder.

That used to be what the Left did—make life better for working people. Asking Americans to make a sacrifice to uphold the global liberal order might be noble, but the sacrifice is not one made without pain. It certainly is not one that should be mocked by coastal liberals who don't have to worry about the price at the pump.

Skylar Baker-Jordan writes about the intersection of identity, politics, and public policy based. He lives in Tennessee.

The views in this article are the writer's own.