On a personal level, I am paying an additional $15 to fill up the old truck – which has a roughly 15 gallon tank – and an additional $22 to fill up the old Trans-Am's tank. It used to cost about that much, by the way, to completely fill up the Trans-Am's tank – back in the '90s, when I bought the car. It is one of the reasons why I was able  to regularly drive it back in those days. Here I am some 30 years later – and no longer in my 20s – and I can only afford to drive the TA occasionally, for short distances, because it costs more than $100 to fill the tank today.

Some rough math: An additional $15 per week adds up to about $60 additional per month – which comes to about $720 additional annually I wasn't having to pay last year. This is what I got for voting for Trump; i.e., a yuge tax increase. In addition to the tax increases Trump likes to refer to as "tariffs," as if we didn't have to pay for those, either.

The war that is the reason why we're paying for it at the pump is currently tamped down a bit but far from being over. More finely, the relevant thing is the Iranians have not opened the Strait and the price of a barrel of oil is still about $95. That's down a little but still up a lot – relative to what it was before Trump decided to start this stupid, evil war. It is possible it will go back down to where it was. Because almost anything is possible. It is possible Trump might remember some of the things he promised he'd do – such as end the federal income tax. It is also possible a bar of gold will show up in the mail today.

Back to the math.

If things stay as they are, Trump's stupid, evil war will have cost me about $2,100 by the time we get to the end of his current term in office. Unlike Trump, I'm not a billionaire, for whom $2,100 is pocket change. Trump, being a billionaire, does not seem to get that $2,100 is a great deal of money for most of us, by which I mean the people who – speaking generally – voted for Trump in the hope that he did understand that $2,100 is a lot of money for us. This was foolish of us, of course – because Trump is a billionaire. Even if he were not a sociopath, it is a bit much to expect someone who has a thousand million dollars – at the minimum – to be capable of empathizing with people for whom $2,100 is no small sum. This speaks to a general problem with the American oligarchy – which is just the right term for it. The people who rule us have very little in common with us, which is why – even if we assume they are not maliciously inclined toward us – they cannot empathize with us.