Five-Point Plan To Lower Gas Prices Skips The War Driving Them

On September 1st, the United States struck Iranian targets near the Strait of Hormuz, and Iran's president said the same day that his country would return to the ceasefire reached in June if Washington did too. Washington did not. Six days later, Iran announced an exclusion zone outside the strait, aimed at vessels it believed were trying to pass — a line drawn around the same water the war kept crossing. By the 9th, a senior Iranian health official was warning that U.S. bombing and blockade had pushed the country's medical system into shortage of roughly 800 medicines. By the 11th, the average price of diesel in America hit $6.06 a gallon, a 14 percent jump in a month and 64 percent in a year. Two days after that, an Iranian cargo ship was hit near Hengam Island by what state media called an unidentified projectile; one person died. By the 16th, inflation in Britain had reached a five-month high, and the government's own statisticians named the same fuel prices as the driver. On the 17th, the Pentagon's third-ranking official sat through a closed briefing and could not give senators straight answers, the same day Senate Democrats — minus one — asked the defense secretary for a receipt on what the war has cost so far. Five days after that, U.N. investigators said two of the strikes the U.S. had already carried out may amount to war crimes.

Then, this week, Iran put a seven-day plan on the table: reopen the strait, revive the nuclear talks. Its president told a Fox anchor the war was "imposed on us," that Tehran never sought it, and that Iran would respond "strongly" if the attacks continued. The offer came with a deadline: Tehran wants a deal with Washington before the midterm elections in November. Oil prices went up anyway, on fresh threats from both governments to open a new front. Into that rise stepped The Federalist, with five things America must do to bring the price down: stop talking it down, drop the windfall-profits tax, quit treating the strategic reserve like a lever. Five points, and not one of them is stop the war. The war is the variable setting the price on every other line in this file — the diesel, the inflation number, the ship, the medicine shortage — and the fix on offer is to manage the number without touching the thing generating it. There is a version of this where the strait reopens and the number comes down on its own. That version was offered, this week, for free.