CORRIN, Neb. — Wayne Kroeger has dispatched long-haul trucks out of a converted feed store in Corrin, Neb., for 22 years. He has a framed copy of a speech about energy independence on the wall beside the coffee maker, and he has read it aloud to every driver who has ever asked for a raise.
Diesel was $6.32 a gallon on Oct. 6, according to AAA, up about 72 percent from a year earlier. Kroeger said the increase does not concern him.
“We make our own energy in this country, and the energy makes its own decisions,” Kroeger said. “Nobody in my family has ever been asked what diesel should cost, and that is what independence looks like. I pay what the country pays. The country is independent of me. I am independent of it. We are all independent of each other, and that is the whole idea.”
Kroeger said his rule is simple. If the country produces a thing, the price of the thing is the country’s business, and a man who drives a truck should not be asking the country for an explanation. He said he has asked for one anyway, twice, and was told the price was “the market.”
Asked whether the market had been set by the same people who set it last year, Kroeger said that was a different market.
Kroeger’s fleet of 14 trucks burned about 41,000 gallons of diesel in September, according to his own log, which he keeps in a binder. Kroeger said he had not done that arithmetic and did not plan to, because doing it would mean a man was keeping track of his own costs, which he described as “the thing the country is trying to get away from.”
Ron Gilchrist, senior spokesperson for the Department of Agricultural Common Sense, said the agency has no position on diesel, which is not an agricultural product, and that it has no position on energy independence, which is not a program. He said the agency was “monitoring the situation through its own channels” and declined to comment further.
Kroeger said the diesel has been independent of him since spring, when it stopped returning his calls.
Martin Pugh, Data and Polling Editor. Kroeger’s figures are from his own binder and were not independently audited.