Americans are being warned to brace for the highest gas prices to ever grace a Thanksgiving holiday travel season, with prices and inflation still soaring across the country.
The nationwide average cost at the pump is projected to hit $3.68 per gallon on Thursday, November 24, as millions of Americans load up their vehicles and make the drive to feast with their family. For some, this may even be the first opportunity to visit relatives since the COVID-19 pandemic began in 2020.
The cost of gas however doesn’t seem to have deterred Americans from travel.
GasBuddy, a leading gas price analysis company, says that 20 percent more Americans than last year are planning to hit the road this Thanksgiving.
“Americans are proving that while we’ll openly complain about high gas prices,” says Patrick De Haan, the head of petroleum analysis at the site, “most of us aren’t deterred from taking to the highways to observe Thanksgiving with those that matter most to us, especially as precautions from the pandemic have eased.”
Inflation remains painfully high, despite being down from its 41-year high in June.
The last two years under the Biden administration have seen extraordinarily high gas prices not seen in almost a decade.
The President has repeatedly taken credit for lowering gas prices from a record high over the summer, all the while failing to acknowledge the fact that gas prices remain higher than the previous years average of $3.20 per gallon.
To put that in perspective, the average cost per gallon at the tail end of the Trump administration was around $2.30.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24 2022 caused a spike in gas prices, referred to as “Putin’s price hike” by the Biden administration.
On February 22, two days before that invasion, Biden announced that he would be halting all new gas and oil drilling across the country, dashing any hopes of the United States becoming energy dependent in the near future.
