Gavin Newsom Just Made California Gas Even More Expensive and Nobody Should Be Surprised

California drivers are about to get hit again. Starting Wednesday, they’ll pay an additional 2.2 cents per gallon at the pump, pushing the state’s excise gas tax to 63.4 cents per gallon. That’s not a typo. Sixty-three point four cents, and that’s before you even count sales tax and local fees that bring the total government take to roughly $1.15 per gallon.

You know what’s remarkable? The audacity of it all. California already has the highest gas prices in the nation at $5.58 per gallon according to AAA. That’s a full $1.65 above the national average. And yet Governor Gavin Newsom and his Sacramento allies seem genuinely confused why people keep leaving the state in droves.

Rep. David Valadao is leading California’s Republican congressional delegation in pushing back against this madness. They sent a letter to Newsom on Friday urging him to suspend the increase. It’s a reasonable request from people watching their constituents choose between filling their tanks and paying other bills. But here’s the thing about Sacramento Democrats: they don’t do reasonable when ideology is on the line.

The anti-fossil fuel crusade has consequences, and California families are living them every single day. Newsom loves to position himself as a champion of working people, but working people are the ones getting crushed by these policies. The single mom driving 40 minutes to her job doesn’t care about the governor’s climate virtue signaling. She cares about whether she can afford to get to work.

This goes beyond just pump prices, though that’s painful enough. When you systematically attack energy production and make it prohibitively expensive to do business, you’re not just hurting drivers. You’re undermining national security. Energy independence matters. It matters when global tensions rise and it matters when supply chains get disrupted. California’s war on fossil fuels is a luxury belief system that assumes someone else will always produce the energy we need.

The free market works when you let it breathe. Competition drives innovation and efficiency in ways government mandates never will. But California has decided that heavy-handed regulation and punishing taxation are somehow the path to prosperity. It’s economic illiteracy dressed up as environmental consciousness.

What really stings is the dishonesty of it all. Sacramento will tell you these taxes fund road repairs and infrastructure. Then you’ll hit another pothole the size of a crater and wonder where exactly those billions went. The state has a spending problem, not a revenue problem, but admitting that would require actual fiscal discipline.

Traditional American principles used to include the idea that government should be limited and people should keep more of what they earn. California has inverted that completely. The state takes and takes and then acts surprised when businesses and families decide they’ve had enough.

Newsom won’t suspend this tax increase. He won’t because doing so would mean acknowledging that his energy policies are fundamentally flawed. It would mean admitting that maybe, just maybe, forcing the most expensive fuel in America on your residents isn’t actually helping them. Politicians rarely admit they’re wrong, especially when they’ve built entire careers on being right about everything.

So California drivers will pay more starting Wednesday. They’ll absorb the hit like they’ve absorbed every other hit. And Sacramento will keep right on pretending that punishing people for needing to drive to work is somehow progressive policy. It’s not progressive. It’s regressive in the most literal sense, hitting lower-income families the hardest while wealthy coastal elites barely notice the difference.

The GOP delegation is right to speak up. Someone needs to say what everyone already knows: this is unsustainable and it’s unfair. Common sense energy policy isn’t radical. It’s just honest about what works and what doesn’t.