A piece published this week in The National Herald argues that elected officials have far less leverage over consumer prices than campaign rhetoric suggests, and that aggregate consumer behavior—rather than legislation or executive action—is the more powerful variable in determining what Americans pay for gasoline and groceries.
The argument lands at a moment when energy and food costs remain politically charged. U.S. gasoline prices have fluctuated significantly through 2025 and into 2026, with the Energy Information Administration tracking retail regular-grade prices that have ranged from roughly $3.10 to over $3.80 per gallon nationally depending on region and season. Grocery inflation, while it moderated from the peaks of 2022 and 2023—when the USDA recorded food-at-home price increases topping 11 percent year-over-year—has not fully reversed, with many staple categories still running 20 to 30 percent above their 2020 baseline in nominal terms.
The National Herald piece draws a line between what governments can theoretically do—strategic reserve releases, tariff adjustments, subsidy structures—and what those tools have demonstrably achieved in sustained price relief. The Biden administration's 2022 release of 180 million barrels from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, for instance, was credited by the EIA with temporarily suppressing prices by an estimated 17 to 42 cents per gallon, but the effect dissipated within months as global crude markets reasserted themselves. Similarly, targeted grocery relief programs have addressed access without meaningfully altering the underlying commodity and logistics pricing that drives shelf costs.
The core economic claim in the piece is structural: gasoline is priced in a global commodity market denominated in dollars and governed by OPEC+ production decisions, refinery capacity, and futures trading—variables almost entirely outside any single government's unilateral control. Grocery prices similarly reflect a compounding of agricultural commodity costs, diesel-dependent freight, labor at processing and retail levels, and packaging materials, each with its own pricing chain.
What the National Herald piece does not address in depth—and what is directly relevant to households that maintain any degree of food or fuel storage—is the relationship between consumer purchasing patterns and spot price signals. When aggregate demand concentrates, as it does before hurricanes, cold snaps, or periods of economic uncertainty, even modest behavioral shifts across millions of households can create localized price spikes that neither federal policy nor retailer goodwill can quickly suppress. The 2021 Colonial Pipeline disruption demonstrated this acutely: a roughly six-day outage produced panic-buying that drove southeastern U.S. gasoline prices up sharply and created shortages in areas not actually on the pipeline's route—a demand-signal problem, not a supply one. This is why the quantity and timing of household procurement decisions, made quietly and routinely rather than reactively, can matter independently of what any administration announces from a podium. Our review of long-shelf-life food storage options has more for readers thinking through that calculus.
The broader debate the National Herald piece reflects—over who bears responsibility for consumer prices—is unlikely to resolve before the 2026 midterm results are fully processed. What the economics literature consistently supports is the article's central premise: commodity-linked consumer prices respond to supply, demand, and monetary conditions at scales that dwarf the instruments available to any single legislative body.
