Heritage bills Americans nearly $1,465 for climate lawsuits; the receipts charge it to Trump's war and drug deals.

…(cont) In August, gas closed above $4 a gallon every day of the month for the first time on record, ninety cents higher than a year before, while the war with Iran kept crude markets unsettled. By September 4, diesel had climbed to $5.85 a gallon, a record. A week later it was $6.06 — fourteen percent higher than a month earlier, sixty-four percent higher than a year before that. Freight runs on diesel. Grocery trucks run on diesel. None of that line item runs through a courtroom.

The same stretch carried a second charge that was supposed to come in lower, not higher. On September 8, Canada's retaliatory tariffs on roughly seven hundred American products took effect, riding the same trucks. On September 20, Public Citizen obtained the paperwork behind the administration's drug-pricing deals with Big Pharma and found the companies kept room to raise prices overseas while the promised savings at home came in narrower than advertised. That's a second entry that was booked as a discount and posted as a wash.

States have been doing their own accounting in the meantime. Georgia suspended its fuel excise tax in March, extended it in May, then let it lapse. By September 21, with diesel still climbing, the state's Democratic nominee for governor was asking the sitting governor to revive the suspension. Kentucky and Indiana have already cut or paused their own gas taxes. Ohio and Massachusetts are drafting the same paperwork now.

Here is what reconciles and what doesn't. A gas tax pause is state revenue, foregone, to cover a household cost the state did not create. The report asks households to file that cost under lawsuits filed by people trying to keep the air breathable. The wire's own dated numbers — August 31, September 4, September 11 — file it under a war that started this year and a drug deal signed the same year, by the same administration.

The charge has to sit somewhere. It does not sit where the report says it sits. Two different columns, hon. Only one of them is honest about which one the taxpayer is standing in.