Good morning.
Wednesday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 77. Sunrise is 6:59 and sunset is 6:25 for 11 hours 26 minutes of daylight. The moon is a waning crescent with 10.6 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Lakes Advisory Committee meets at 4 PM and the Landmarks Commission at 6 PM.
On this day in 1777, Americans defeat British forces under General John Burgoyne in the Second Battle of Saratoga, compelling Burgoyne’s eventual surrender.
Diesel fuel is inordinately expensive, with the reckless and feckless war against Iran having pushed fuel costs higher. See FREE WHITEWATER, Wisconsin’s Economy Depends on Diesel (and Now Diesel Costs Much More), September 18, 2026.
Does the man who started this war in February have a solution in October? No, he does not.
Instead, he has a futility wrapped in an executive order:
The Trump administration, growing increasingly fretful of high fuel prices just a month before the U.S. midterm elections, issued late Monday a novel executive order meant to make diesel fuel a little cheaper for beleaguered truckers and farmers. It almost certainly won’t help.
U.S. President Donald Trump authorized the deferral, through the end of the year, of federal taxes on diesel fuel used to power vehicles on roads and highways. (That tax revenue, like the gasoline tax, helps pay for highway maintenance.) His solution is to temporarily legalize the use of so-called red-dye diesel—a tax-free diesel flavor normally earmarked for off-road uses such as agriculture, mining, and logging—for use by truckers.
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But there are a lot of problems with the hail-mary measure. For starters, it is only a deferral of those federal fuel taxes, not an outright suspension. Unless Congress passes legislation, at some point those deferred taxes will come due, which simply means storing up bigger bills and bigger accounting headaches for truckers down the road.
“It’s one thing to waive a tax and another thing to simply defer it. This just looks like a mess, but then again, it’s all a circus,” said Tom Kloza, the chief energy advisor at Gulf Oil and a four-decade veteran of petroleum product markets.
More importantly, while the measure could, if taken up by both sellers and buyers of red-dye diesel, slightly lower prices for some highway users, it won’t add any supplies to a very tight market. The reason U.S. diesel prices are high is because supplies of diesel are strained, and there is little relief on the horizon. U.S. refiners can’t produce any more than they already are, and other global exporters have voluntarily or involuntarily curbed their own supplies.
“This doesn’t move the needle in any way on diesel availability,” Kloza said.
See Keith Johnson, Trump’s red-dye diesel plan has a major flaw, Foreign Policy, October 6, 2026.
Economic ignorance isn’t the stuff of victory — it’s the stuff of otherwise foreseeable consequences regrettably ignored.
James Webb Space Telescope Reveals Cosmic ‘Technicolor Dreamscape’: