Gas prices are up a few more cents, and once again the nation is in a tizzy.

and

Donald Trump even told a Las Vegas crowd Friday that, if elected president,

. Trump’s tea party crowd then cheered widely for this clear-cut socialist policy proposal. America’s lust for cheap gas trumps ideological conviction, apparently.

Locally, people are even suffering the indignity of riding the bus to avoid high gas prices, and consumers are considering buying smaller cars.

Is this the America we once knew, or is this Pol Pot’s Cambodia? Someone was going to say it. Let's just get that out of the way right now.

The one interesting thought about the higher price of gas came from a caller to 97.1’s “

” show earlier this week. The caller said he lives at home in Brighton, works full time, and commutes to Wayne State University. For him, high gas prices are like the proverbial straw breaking the camel’s back.

It’s hard not to feel bad for a guy in that situation. At the same time, why are we only talking about the straw, not the rest of this guy’s financial weight?

People will talk gas prices without end, yet a discussion about the exponentially rising cost of higher education draws crickets. University tuition costs have risen at a rate greater than inflation for something like 30 years. And that’s the real problem for our friend on the radio.

Nor is it considered good form to say the burden of high gas prices is more problematic because of a half-century of government-subsidized sprawl. After all, it’s only within my relatively short lifetime that anyone would reasonably consider Brighton as part of metro Detroit.

As a matter of public policy, we are spending tax dollars in ways that ensure we all drive more and, therefore, spend more at the pump. That’s insane. Especially if you consider tax dollars spent on sprawl could have been put toward building a transit system that provides commuters an alternative to driving at $4+ a gallon. Or, not spent at all. Either way, I’m good.

Complaining about gas prices is stupid. Not because gas prices aren’t high. They are. Not because BP, Exxon, et al are making a few extra billion every time the price goes up. They are. Not because those high costs are a real burden to so many. They are.

The stupidity of the gas price discussion is that it takes place in this sterile bubble where high gas prices exist (and affect our lives) independent of anything else. That delusion needs to end.