With California drivers once again staring at the nation’s highest gas prices, Sacramento Democrats have settled on a familiar culprit — everyone but themselves — and a familiar fix: more government. State lawmakers are now backing a bill that would let California unleash its emergency price-gouging laws against oil companies, the New York Post reported.
The Wartime Price Gouging Prevention Act, or SB 493, co-authored by state Sens. Josh Becker (D-Menlo Park) and Ben Allen (D-Santa Monica), would add “war” to the list of declared emergencies — alongside wildfires, floods, earthquakes and pandemics — during which businesses are barred from raising prices on essentials by more than 10%. The measure would empower Gov. Gavin Newsom to declare a war-related emergency, handing Attorney General Rob Bonta the authority to chase suspected gougers over the Iran conflict.
Becker framed it as closing a loophole. “Right now it’s just the Attorney General can’t prosecute, he can’t go after that,” he told the Post. “He just can’t do it because of the way the law is structured.” He pointed to the spread between branded and unbranded gasoline as his smoking gun: “Across the country, it’s only five cents a different spread, but in California, since the start of the war, it’s been 31 cents.”
Backers say the war has cost Californians roughly $3 billion — about $250 per household — as part of $62 billion in added fuel costs nationwide.
Left conspicuously out of the Democrats’ theory of the case is California itself. Oil companies have long argued the state’s eye-watering pump prices are driven by its own taxes, fees, layers of environmental regulation and an isolated fuel market that can’t easily import supply — a stack of Sacramento’s own policy choices, not a wartime conspiracy. Republicans, too, have pinned the burden on California’s gas taxes.
Becker all but conceded the point even as he waved it away. “Those gas tax revenues do pay for all the road repairs and critical infrastructure in my district and across the state,” he said, insisting the gas tax is “a separate fight.” The American Petroleum Institute, for its part, told the BBC that fuel prices “don’t move in lockstep with crude oil” and that the war was still rippling through supply, refining and inventories.
The Democrats do have one unlikely ally in the hunt for villains: President Trump, who has ordered the DOJ to probe whether oil companies are “gouging” drivers by failing to pass along falling crude prices. “Gasoline prices better start going down a lot faster than what I’m seeing!” he wrote on Truth Social.
SB 493 cleared the Assembly Public Safety Committee on Tuesday and heads next to Appropriations. Whether a fresh emergency decree does anything to lower prices at the pump is another matter — and the one question Sacramento seems determined never to ask itself.
Source: nypost.com
