Category: Cost of Living
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California diesel averaged $8.039 a gallon in the week ending September 14
Diesel fuel in California averaged $8.039 a gallon for the week ending September 14, 2026, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s weekly retail price survey. That figure sits well above both the national picture and the wider West Coast region the state belongs to, and the distance between them has been widening for more…
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Diesel costs 68 percent more than a year ago, and almost everything in a grocery store arrives on a truck
Diesel fuel has climbed sharply over the past year, and the increase touches far more than what shows up at a truck stop pump. Nearly every packaged, fresh, or frozen item that reaches a grocery store shelf spends at least part of its trip on the back of a truck, so a move this size…
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Employers expect the biggest jump in health coverage costs since 2003, and most large ones will pass more of it on
Mercer’s latest look at employer health costs lands with an uncomfortable number attached. The consulting firm’s preliminary survey of more than 1,800 U.S. employers projects that total health benefit cost per employee will climb 8.2% on average in 2027, the largest year-over-year increase since 2003, even after employers have already trimmed their plans to hold…
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Diesel hit $6.285 a gallon last week, the highest in the federal price record that began in 1994
The federal government’s weekly survey of diesel pump prices recorded $6.285 a gallon for the week ending September 14, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s Weekly Retail Gasoline and Diesel Prices report. That is the highest figure the agency has published since the series began in March 1994, and it followed a jump of…
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More than a million people dropped exchange coverage after the extra premium help expired
Enrollment in Affordable Care Act marketplace plans fell by more than a million sign-ups for 2026, the sharpest one-year drop since the marketplaces opened, after enhanced premium tax credits expired at the end of 2025 and were not renewed. That figure describes people who picked a plan during open enrollment, not the smaller number who…
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The promised $500 health exchange refunds go only to enrollees who received no premium help
A one-time payment of $500 is headed toward roughly a million Affordable Care Act enrollees, according to a White House fact sheet published September 10, 2026. The offer sounds broad enough to help any marketplace shopper frustrated by rising premiums, but the eligibility line drawn inside the announcement narrows it sharply. Only enrollees in the…
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More than half of everything the United States imports now carries a new tariff
A new tally from the Tax Foundation, a nonpartisan tax policy research group, finds that products now subject to an active tariff make up a majority of everything the United States buys from other countries. The finding follows a year in which tariff policy shifted more than fifty times, including a Supreme Court ruling that…
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A new executive order tells the EPA to push seven states to repeal stormwater fees, but it cancels no one’s bill
President Trump signed an executive order on September 16 that revokes a 2009 directive tied to Chesapeake Bay cleanup and instructs the Environmental Protection Agency to press seven watershed jurisdictions on their local stormwater fees. The order itself describes those charges, often called rain taxes, as imposing hundreds of dollars a year in costs on…
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Farmers are getting 17.1 percent more for wheat this year and 6.3 percent less for milk
Farmers are getting paid more for one crop and less for another this year, and the gap between those two numbers says more about how food actually gets priced than either figure does on its own. Wheat growers are watching their return climb by double digits. Dairy producers are watching theirs slide for a second…
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Prescription drug prices did not move at all in August
The federal government’s monthly scorecard on retail prices logged no change at all for prescription drugs in August. Hospital care and physician visits were flat too, even as the broader cost of medical care in the United States kept drifting down on paper. For a household staring at a pharmacy receipt that moved anyway, the…