Lower gas usage drives gas prices down in 2025. Time for Trump/GOP to stop that trend!

One thing that has kept inflation from being worse in 2025 is because gas prices have been at their lowest levels since the COVID pandemic. It has been consistently below $3 a gallon for much of this year in Wisconsin, and this chart from AAA shows that there was no spike in prices in Spring or Summer like there usually is.

So why has this happened? A big reason why is that we aren't using as much gas as we used to. Though there are millions more people in America today than there were in the 2010s, you can see that the amount of gasoline used has consistently been less in the 2020s than in the last half of the prior decade, even as pandemic restrictions on travel have been largely gone in the last 4 years.

And this has resulted in gasoline being more plentiful in 2025 than in any non-COVID year other than 2022, when gas was approximately 50% higher than it is today.

With this lower demand leading to higher available supplies of gas, no wonder why prices at the pump are staying under control (well, other than the 25-cent increase we in Wisconsin saw in the last week due to flooding at a refinery in NW Indiana).

The reason I bring this up is that tax credits for purchasing various alternative energy vehicles are going away at the end of next month, due to provisions in Trump/GOP's Tax Scam 2.0. This may endanger future growth in US purchases of electric and hybrid vehicles, which have increased from just over 718,000 in 2019 to nearly 3.18 million in 2024.

Perhaps the Biden-era incentives and incubations for more of these types of autos that don't fully use gas have made more Americans want to buy these types of vehicles, and more assembly lines are set up for these types of vehicles than there was in 2019. So maybe we won't see sales of these types of vehicles fall off after September 30, and maybe US demand for gasoline will stay at the lower levels that they are at today.

But if that doesn't happen, and people turn back to using more gas with the vehicles that they have, then the relief that so many have been able to feel at the pump in 2025 might go away in 2026 and beyond, and the inflationary environment we are already in will have added price pressures. Which sure as hell isn't what some Americans thought they were going to get with Donald Trump in office (SUCKERS!).