Since the cost of everything goes up every year because of inflation, why is it expected that gas will stay the same price?
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Price of gas is increasing more than that of the general inflation rate. But part of this is because of the surplus created by covid.
The price of gasoline has risen 400% more than inflation. That’s…pretty much the entire answer. Gasoline companies use any excuse to drive their prices up as high as they can.
Changes are frequent, visible, and you can’t do much about it. There are places where you HAVE to have a car (for example, it was a 12 minute drive to my kids’ high school, or an hour and twenty minutes on three busses). You can’t just not drive sometimes. It’s not a luxury that you stop using, and the things that you can do to make it better (drive less frequently, maintain your car well, drive at efficient speeds) don’t make that big of a dent if you were already close to being as efficient as possible.
>why is it expected that gas will stay the same price
Its not. You’re just wrong here.
Oil prices are the primary driver of gas prices, and oil price can be highly variable on the world market that does not necessarily reflect inflation or inflation within any single country. Inflation matters, but much much less than the price of the underlying raw material needed to make gas: oil.
I find it funny how these people complaining about the high price of gas
don’t complain about the price of cigarettes.
because inflation is an aggregate – an average – of rising prices across an entire economy; not a measure of only one product’s price within that economy.
Inflation is going to account for all manner of goods and services, and their prices – not just gasoline.
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I mean that in the sense that in 2018, gasoline in my state was around $2.80. Now it’s around $4.05. That’s about a 44% increase, and if we treat inflation as equal, that would imply that over the last 4 years inflation was 11%.
Except inflation *hasn’t been* 11%.
Using gasoline alone to determine inflation is a bad faith argument here.
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We can instead look at crude oil price per barrel, which here’s a handy link
https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=pet&s=f000000__3&f=m
The last time a barrel was going for under $10 was 1998-1999, a few brief months of that winter holiday season. Otherwise it has generally and consistently risen from around $10 to the data from last year’s numbers of around $50-70/barrel.
Inflation again here isn’t going to match – not only because the percentage won’t match on years prices increase, but it won’t be able to reconcile with years the price for a barrel of crude dropped.
I would expect the actual answer to OP’s question is much more related to supply and demand, rather than inflation.
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Which if we consider things over the last few decades like ethanol additives to stretch gasoline out a bit, or fracking practices to add more local (and thus cheaper) oil into a supply that competes with foreign oil, we can understand better how and why gas prices are what they are – much better than examining inflation as only one cause.
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