I filled up on a Tuesday that already felt expensive before I even rolled down the window. The board said $4.36 for regular. A year earlier the same station had been closer to $3.13, and the gap was not a rounding error. It was the kind of jump that turns a routine errand into a quiet argument with yourself about whether the extra trip across town is worth it. So when word came that the White House was thinking about suspending the federal gas tax, my first reaction was not political. It was arithmetic. Eighteen cents and change off a gallon sounds tidy. It also sounds small next to a dollar-plus rise. That tension is the whole story.
Asked whether the federal levy on gasoline should be paused, the president said the administration was thinking about it. No timeline. No draft bill. No promise that the idea would survive contact with Congress. Still, the sentence landed because pump prices have become a daily referendum. Households feel them. Truckers feel them. Farmers feel them. Markets price them before the evening news even starts.
Why A Gas Tax Pause Is Back In The Conversation
The federal gasoline tax sits at 18.4 cents per gallon. Diesel carries a higher federal rate, 24.4 cents, which matters once you leave the family sedan and start talking freight. Those pennies were built, decades ago, to feed the Highway Trust Fund. Roads, bridges, the unglamorous steel that keeps a commute from becoming a crater. Suspend the tax and you do not erase the cost of asphalt. You shift who pays, and when.
I’ve found that people hear “tax holiday” and picture a clean discount at the pump the next morning. Reality is messier. Retailers do not always pass every cent through. State taxes stay put. Wholesale markets can eat the relief before it reaches the nozzle. And a pause that is not paired with a plan for the trust fund is a pause with a bill attached.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect is the timing. The idea is surfacing while officials argue, in public, that the Strait of Hormuz is moving oil again at volumes that match or beat the period before the latest fighting. If the chokepoint is no longer the bottleneck, a tax cut starts to look like a political answer to a refining and risk problem. That is a different diagnosis. It leads to a different fix.
What 18.4 Cents Actually Buys A Driver
Run the numbers on a typical tank and the romance fades a little. A 15-gallon fill saves about $2.76 if every federal cent is passed through. A commuter burning 12 gallons a week saves roughly $2.20. Over a month that is real money for a tight budget. It is not, on its own, the difference between $3.13 and $4.36.
The spread that hurts is the dollar-plus. A federal pause nibbles the edge. Crude, crack spreads, insurance on tankers, and the simple fact that fewer domestic refineries are running at full song do the heavy lifting. I keep coming back to that split because it decides whether the proposal is relief or theater.
A tax you can see is easier to suspend than a shortage you cannot. Drivers notice the sign. They rarely see the refinery that closed two states over.
Market observer, on why fuel politics gravitates to the levy
None of this means the levy is irrelevant. Stacked on state taxes, it is part of the posted price. In a high-price regime, every visible cent gets a hearing. The question is whether a hearing is the same thing as a cure.
How The Highway Trust Fund Enters The Argument
Gas and diesel taxes are not a general slush fund in the way income taxes are. They are user fees with a job. Pull them for a season and road money has to come from somewhere else: general revenue, borrowing, or a quieter cut to projects that were already on a list. States notice. Contractors notice. So do the senators who treat highway bills like local employment programs.
Past proposals for a federal holiday have stalled on exactly this point. Who backfills the trust fund? For how long? Does the pause expire on a date, or does it drift until the politics cool? Those are not footnotes. They are the deal.
A Quick Map Of What Sits Inside A Gallon
Prices move for reasons that do not fit on a campaign sign. Crude is the big slice. Refining is the transformation cost, and it swings hard when plants go offline. Distribution and marketing cover the truck, the station, the card fees. Taxes are the line item voters can name. In a calm market, taxes feel large. In a stressed market, they shrink next to the crack spread.
| Piece of the pump price | What usually moves it | Can a federal pause touch it? |
| Crude oil | Global supply, risk premium, shipping | No |
| Refining margin | Plant outages, seasonal blends, imports | No |
| Distribution and retail | Freight, station competition, card costs | Indirectly, if retailers pass relief |
| Federal fuel tax | Statute, not the spot market | Yes, if Congress or a lawful pause acts |
| State and local tax | State legislatures | No |
Look at that last column. One row says yes. The rows that explain a dollar move say no. That is not an argument against relief. It is an argument against expecting relief to rewind the year.
The Hormuz Claim And The Counterclaim
At a stop in Maryland, the president described the Strait of Hormuz as open, with millions of barrels moving in recent days and flows at times exceeding the prewar pace. That is a strong claim. If it holds, the old story, that a blocked strait is the sole reason gasoline is expensive, starts to fray.
A senior Iranian parliamentary figure had said, only days earlier, that the waterway would stay shut until Washington met conditions tied to an earlier summer understanding. Two narratives, same stretch of water. Traders do not need them to agree. They need to know which ships are actually loading.
In my experience, chokepoint headlines overshoot both ways. A single tense week gets priced as a permanent closure. A single calm week gets priced as all-clear. The useful habit is to watch barrels, not adjectives. Insurance rates on hulls. Waiting times. Whether liftings from the Gulf are showing up in Asian and European intake. Rhetoric is fast. Cargo is slow, and slow is what inventories care about.
- Flows through Hormuz can recover on paper while freight insurance stays expensive.
- A reopened lane does not rebuild a refinery that has been hit or idled.
- Public claims from both sides tend to lead the cargo data by days, sometimes weeks.
- Markets punish the gap between a speech and a bill of lading.
Refineries, Not Just The Strait
A social post from the president shifted the blame away from the strait and toward refineries. Russian plants, he argued, were being struck. American plants, he argued, were being shut in states he described as politically hostile, with California named outright. You can disagree with the framing and still grant the mechanical point. Gasoline is not crude. It is crude that has been run through a specific kit of towers, crackers, and blend tanks.
Lose that kit and the barrel in the ground does less for the price on the corner. California has its own fuel spec, its own isolated market, and a long record of refinery retirements. When one large plant stumbles, the state does not borrow a neighbor’s gasoline the way the Midwest can. Prices gap. The rest of the country watches and wonders why its own sign moved too. Often the answer is exports, shared crude, and a national futures contract that does not care about your zip code.
Ukraine’s strikes on Russian refining and on the Black Sea terminal at Novorossiysk belong in the same ledger. They do not set the US retail price by themselves. They tighten a global product balance that was already jumpy. Diesel feels it first. Gasoline follows when refiners chase the more profitable cut.
What Official Supply Analysis Has Been Pointing At
Energy analysts tracking the third quarter pointed to a stack of disruptions, not a single villain. Renewed strikes in the Middle East. Attacks on crude tankers. A blockade on Iranian exports. Hits on pumping stations along Saudi Arabia’s east-west pipeline. Attacks on Saudi tankers near the Bab el-Mandeb. Ukrainian drones on a major Russian Black Sea oil terminal. From early July into early September, daily oil prices jerked around on statements from Washington, Tehran, and regional capitals about military plans and the odds of a deal.
That list is awkward for anyone selling a one-cause story. It is also awkward for anyone selling a one-cent solution. A tax pause does not escort a tanker. It does not restart a coker. It does not refill a strategic draw that was meant to be temporary.
Volatility from July into September tracked headlines about war and peace as much as it tracked actual barrels. The premium was a mood with a price.
Moods fade. Damaged kit does not. If the autumn story is really about refining and residual risk, then a spring-style tax holiday is answering last season’s question.
The Diesel Order Sitting Beside The Gas Tax Talk
A day before the gas-tax remark, an executive order aimed at diesel for farmers and truckers. The idea was to widen access to red-dyed diesel, the off-road fuel that normally stays off the highway, and to ease federal penalties for highway use while officials review whether some diesel tax payments can be deferred through the end of the year. The White House framed the savings at roughly $100 a fill-up for truckers.
That is a different instrument from a gasoline holiday, and honestly the more interesting one if you care about grocery shelves. Trucking diesel is a cost that hides inside lettuce, lumber, and the parcel on your step. A hundred dollars off a large fill is not trivial for an owner-operator running thin. It is also temporary, conditional, and tied to enforcement choices that can be reversed.
Red-dyed fuel exists so tax collectors can see, at a glance, whether someone is burning untaxed gallons on a public road. Expand the exception and you buy relief. You also buy a compliance headache. Stations, fleets, and auditors will all want the rule in writing before they bet a business on a dye color.
- Confirm the fuel is actually legal for the miles you plan to run.
- Keep the paperwork that shows the penalty relief applies to your operation.
- Do not assume a deferred tax is a forgiven tax.
- Price the savings after any extra stops or blend limits.
Politics Will Try To Own The Whole Dollar
Opponents have been blunt. One Democratic senator called the conflict with Iran the primary cause of the price spike and of broader inflation, and argued that the power to declare war sits with Congress. That is a constitutional claim wrapped around a price claim. Both can be debated. Neither is settled by a cent-per-gallon proposal.
I do not think voters keep a scorecard of pipeline attacks and dye rules. They keep a receipt. If the receipt is ugly, the party in power owns it, fair or not. If a pause shows up as even a dime at the pump, the same party will claim the dime. The rest of the dollar will still be sitting there, waiting for the next argument.
There is a quieter risk. A holiday that fails to move the sign teaches people that government cannot touch the price. A holiday that moves the sign for three weeks and then expires teaches them that the relief was rented. Either lesson sticks.
What A Suspension Would Need In Order To Matter
Talk is cheap. A pause that drivers can verify needs a few plain pieces. A start date. An end date. A rule on whether retailers must pass the cut through, or at least a spotlight ugly enough that stations which pocket it get named. A backfill for the trust fund that is not a shrug. And a sentence, in public, about what the pause is not expected to fix.
Without those, the phrase “we’re thinking about that” is a weather report. It tells you the topic is in the air. It does not tell you to budget for cheaper miles.
A usable pause, stripped down: Start date and end date in writing Pass-through that shows up on the receipt Trust-fund backfill that is not a rumor No promise that crude or refining will obey
State taxes are the other trap. Several states already layer 30, 40, even 50 cents or more on top of the federal slice, once you count fees that behave like taxes. A federal holiday in a high-tax state is a smaller percentage cut than the headline implies. Drivers in low-tax states feel a larger share of the same 18.4 cents. Geography, again.
Households, Fleets, And The Budget That Does Not Care About Headlines
A family running two cars and a commute that cannot become a train ride is exposed in a way a downtown renter is not. The same gallon funds very different lives. Rural miles, shift work, a teenager who just got a license. Fuel inflation is uneven, and uneven inflation makes for angry town halls.
Fleets have more tools and less romance. They hedge. They idle policy. They switch lanes. A tax pause helps the unhedged gallon. It does less for a carrier that already locked diesel in the spring. That is why the diesel order, narrow as it is, may move more freight math than a gasoline holiday moves household math.
Would I plan a vacation around a rumored pause? No. Would I notice an 18-cent break if it actually printed on the receipt for a few months? Yes. The difference between those two sentences is the whole policy.
Markets Will Trade The Rumor Before The Statute
Gasoline futures do not wait for a signing ceremony. If traders believe a pause is real and will lift demand a notch, they can bid the product curve before a single station changes its sign. The effect is usually small. Demand for gasoline is stubborn in the short run. People still drive to work. They do not suddenly take a cross-country trip because the federal slice vanished.
The larger market tell is refining. If margins stay wide while crude eases, the problem is the plant, not the levy. If margins compress and crude stays elevated, the problem is the barrel. A tax story that ignores that split will age badly within a week of inventory data.
Equity markets treat this as a consumer story more than an energy story. A visible cut at the pump is a small boost to discretionary spend, concentrated among households that drive a lot and save little. It is not a stimulus package. Retailers of fuel may see volume up and margin down if they pass the cut through. Refiners barely notice, unless the pause somehow changes which barrels they run. It should not.
Lessons From Earlier Holidays, Without The Nostalgia
States have tried this. A few weeks off the state levy, a summer promotion, a rebate check that arrives after the driving season. The pattern is familiar. Prices dip where competition is fierce. They dip less where a station has the only pumps for twenty miles. When the holiday ends, the old rate returns and the sign jumps by roughly the amount that left, plus whatever crude did in the meantime. People remember the jump. They forget the crude.
Federal versions have been proposed in both parties when prices stung. They rarely clear Congress, because the trust fund objection is bipartisan even when the rhetoric is not. A president can float the idea. Writing the statute is someone else’s pen.
That institutional friction is easy to mock and hard to skip. Fuel taxes are one of the last user fees with a clear pipe to a specific fund. Break the pipe often enough and the next argument will be about raising the rate to “catch up,” which is how temporary relief becomes a permanent fight.
California, Specs, And The Closed Plant Problem
It is worth sitting with the refining point, because it keeps getting waved away. California gasoline is a special blend. You cannot simply rail in Gulf Coast fuel and call it done without the right specification and the right permits. When a coastal plant closes, the slack has to come from remaining in-state units or from a thin set of imports that arrive by ship. Both are expensive when the world is already tight.
Blaming “blue states” is a political shorthand. The underlying math is capacity, regulation, and the cost of keeping an old plant legal. Other regions have lost plants too, for reasons that had nothing to do with one party’s platform. Hurricanes, poor returns, the long drift toward fewer and larger facilities. A national price still feels those losses, because product markets are linked even when pipelines are not.
If the administration wants prices down in a lasting way, the unglamorous agenda is spare capacity, predictable permitting, and a product market that can absorb one outage without a statewide spike. A tax pause does not substitute for that agenda. At best it buys time while someone else does the harder work. At worst it substitutes for it.
Shipping Risk Still Has A Price Even When The Lane Is Open
An open strait is not a cheap strait. War-risk premia on hulls, crew reluctance, and the occasional dark week all sit inside the freight rate. A barrel that arrives is not the same as a barrel that arrives on the old schedule at the old insurance cost. Traders pay for certainty. Certainty has been scarce since tanker attacks and pipeline hits entered the regular brief.
Bab el-Mandeb sits on the other side of the Arabian Peninsula from Hormuz, and trouble there reroutes ships the long way around Africa. That detour does not always dominate US gasoline. It does tighten the global system. Tight systems transmit. A refinery outage in one basin and a freight spike in another can meet in the same futures settlement.
So when someone says record barrels are moving, ask the next question. At what freight? On what delay? Insured by whom? The answers decide whether the risk premium is actually gone or merely hiding in a line item most drivers never see.
Inflation Politics And The Receipt Test
Fuel is visible inflation. Groceries hide. Rent hides until the lease turns. Gasoline updates on a pole beside the road, sometimes twice a day. That visibility is why a modest tax idea can dominate a news cycle that also includes pipeline sabotage and refinery closures. The pole is the messenger.
Central bank officials tend to look through fuel spikes if they believe the spike will fade. Households do not look through anything. They pay it. A pause that arrives after months of elevated prices will feel late, even if the economics are tidy. A pause that arrives and is swamped by the next crude rally will feel fake. Expectations are part of the price.
I’ve watched this cycle enough times to be skeptical of round-number promises. “We’ll get it under three” is a slogan. Inventory, spare refining, and a quieter shipping map are a plan. The slogan is faster to say.
What Drivers Can Actually Watch This Month
You do not need a terminal to track the story. A few public markers tell you whether the pause talk is the main event or a side show.
- Wholesale gasoline versus the retail sign in your city. A wide gap means stations still have room, or padding.
- Regional inventory reports. Draws in the coasts matter more than a national average if you live on a coast.
- Refinery utilization. A number sliding while demand is ordinary is a warning.
- Freight and insurance chatter around Gulf loadings. Open is not the same as cheap.
- Any actual legislative text. Thinking is not drafting.
If those markers ease and the tax stays, prices can still fall. If those markers tighten and the tax vanishes, prices can still rise. The levy is a wedge. The wedge is not the log.
A Plain Reading Of The $100 Diesel Claim
Take the trucker figure seriously enough to test it. A hundred dollars a fill depends on tank size and on how much of the diesel tax is actually avoided or deferred. A highway tractor with large saddles can see a number in that neighborhood if the full federal diesel slice is lifted on a big fill. A smaller straight truck will not. Deferral is not forgiveness. If the review ends and the bill comes due in January, the cash-flow gift becomes a cash-flow cliff.
Farmers burning dyed fuel off-road already sit outside the highway tax in normal times. The order matters most where the line between field and highway has been rigid, and where a grower or a hauler was paying highway rates on miles that feel, to them, like work rather than travel. The politics of that line are old. The enforcement of that line is where the savings will be won or lost.
Rough diesel check: tank gallons x federal cents avoided = fill-up relief. Deferral still owes a date.Gasoline and diesel are siblings, not twins. A holiday on one does not automatically calm the other. If anything, a gasoline pause that lifts summer driving while diesel stays tight can pull refiners toward gasoline and leave freight paying up. Policy that helps the car can lean on the truck. Worth saying out loud.
Who Gains, Who Waits, Who Pays Later
Heavy drivers gain first, if pass-through is real. Low-mileage households gain a rounding error. Road contractors wait to see whether the trust fund is made whole. Future drivers pay if the holiday becomes an excuse to ignore capacity. That distribution is why the idea polls better than it legislates.
There is also a fairness gripe that does not get enough air. People who do not drive still use roads, through buses, goods, and emergency services. A user fee puts the cost on fuel burners. Swap it for general revenue and you socialize it. Some will call that fairer. Others will call it a quiet shift from a visible fee to an invisible one. Both descriptions can be true.
I lean toward keeping user fees honest and using targeted relief when a shock is clearly temporary. A year-long climb from the low threes to the mid fours does not look temporary yet. Treating it with a tool designed for a bad month risks teaching the wrong lesson about what the tool can do.
Scenarios That Do Not Require A Crystal Ball
Three paths are enough. None of them needs a prediction about the next speech.
First, the remark stays a remark. Prices follow crude and refining. The tax debate fades until the next spike. This is the base case until a bill exists.
Second, a short federal pause passes, pass-through is decent, and crude cooperates. Drivers see something like 10 to 18 cents for a season. The trust fund is backfilled. The sign improves and nobody pretends the war risk vanished. This is the version that can be defended without spin.
Third, a pause is announced, crude rallies, a refinery trips, and the sign ignores the holiday. The politics curdle. The next proposal is louder and less precise. This is the version that makes people cynical, and cynicism is expensive.
Between those paths, the diesel order can succeed or stumble on its own. Enforcement clarity will decide it more than the press release will.
How To Read The Next Official Sentence
When the next comment lands, listen for nouns, not tone. Does it name a date? Does it name the trust fund? Does it admit that refining and freight still set the spread? A sentence that only names the tax is a sentence aimed at the pole on the corner. A sentence that names capacity is aimed at the problem.
The same filter works on the criticism. A claim that one conflict explains the entire move from $3.13 to $4.36 has to survive the inventory table, the outage list, and the freight tape. Sometimes it mostly does. Often it does not. Single-cause stories are comforting. Fuel markets are a pile of causes with a shared receipt.
What I Would Tell Someone Staring At $4.36
Do not budget the pause until it is law and until your station has moved. Do treat the diesel rule as a fleet issue if you run trucks or you buy from people who do. Do watch refining headlines in your region with more attention than you watch the strait, at least until product stocks stop falling. And do remember the scale. Eighteen cents is a tool. A dollar is a condition.
The condition was built from tanker risk, pipeline hits, a blocked export stream, strikes on Russian facilities and a Black Sea terminal, and a domestic refining map that has less slack than it used to. Hormuz may be moving barrels again. That helps. It does not rewind the rest.
If the administration turns “we’re thinking about that” into text, the fair test is simple. Did the receipt change by something close to the federal slice? Did road funding get a real replacement? Did anyone pretend the other forces had been solved? Pass those three and the pause is a legitimate, limited relief. Fail them and it is a headline with a pump in the background.
I keep the Tuesday fill-up in mind because policy arguments get abstract fast. The number on the sign does not. It either comes down or it does not. Everything else, the strait, the dye, the trust fund, the speeches, is a story we tell about that number. Some of the story is true. The number still gets the last word.
A Longer Look At Pass-Through, Because That Is Where Holidays Go To Die
Assume, for a moment, that a pause becomes real on a Monday. Wholesale racks adjust overnight in competitive markets. Dealers who buy on a weekly contract are still sitting on fuel they paid tax on. They will not volunteer a loss. The sign moves in steps, not in a single honest drop, and the steps depend on how fast old gallons clear the tanks under the forecourt.
That lag is where cynicism breeds. A driver who hears “18 cents off” on Monday and sees seven cents on Thursday decides the station stole the rest. Sometimes the station is slow. Sometimes the rack has not fully moved. Sometimes a local competitor is already pinned to a street price and nobody has room. The federal change is clean. The retail change is a negotiation with inventory.
Regions with lots of stations and transparent rack postings pass cuts through faster. Rural stretches with one operator pass them through when that operator feels like it, or when a competitor thirty miles away forces the issue. Any national claim about “drivers will save” is an average wearing a costume. Your town is a sample of one.
There is a fix policy people rarely like. Tie the holiday to a posted rack formula and publish the expected retail band. It feels like price supervision. It also makes pocketing the cut harder. I am not sure Washington wants that fight. I am sure drivers will invent it themselves on social feeds if the sign barely budges.
Seasonal Blends Still Matter More Than Speeches
Fall is when summer gasoline specifications ease in much of the country. That switch usually helps. It is a quiet gift from chemistry, not from Congress. If a tax pause lands in the same window, politicians will claim the whole decline. Part of the decline would have shown up anyway as cheaper-to-make winter blends reach the racks.
The reverse is also true. A pause that expires in late spring, just as summer specs return and driving picks up, will look like a betrayal even if the calendar was printed on page one. Timing is not a detail. It is the difference between a policy that feels like help and a policy that feels like a setup.
Refiners plan turnarounds around these seasons. A cluster of maintenance in a tight market is enough to erase a tax holiday’s optics in a week. Nobody schedules a turnaround to spite a press conference. They schedule it because the unit needs the work. The price does not care about the motive.
Global Barrels, Local Signs
US pump prices are local and global at once. A Gulf Coast refinery can ship product out if overseas buyers pay more. That export valve supports domestic runs, and it also means a tight Atlantic basin can tug US prices even when American crude is adequate. Blocking that valve to “keep gasoline home” sounds tough and often backfires, because refiners run less if they cannot sell the extra cut.
The same logic sits behind the Hormuz argument. Barrels delivered “at record numbers” still have to find a refinery that wants them, a spec they can meet, and a freight bill someone will pay. Abundance at the loading port is not abundance at the nozzle. I wish more price arguments started from that sentence.
Russia’s damaged refining and the Novorossiysk hits matter here as product stories, not just crude stories. When a large exporter struggles to turn barrels into diesel and gasoline, the rest of the world bids for the gallons that still exist. American drivers do not buy Russian gasoline. They buy a price that has Russian absence inside it.
The Trust Fund Conversation Nobody Wants On Camera
Ask a room who wants cheaper fuel and every hand goes up. Ask who wants to freeze a bridge project in their county and the hands drop. That is the trust fund in human form. Federal fuel taxes have not kept pace with construction inflation for years, which is why the fund already leans on transfers. A holiday widens a gap that was not closed.
Backfilling from general revenue is the usual patch. It works until the general budget is the fight. It also blurs the user-fee idea until nobody remembers why the tax was separated in the first place. I do not think that blur is fatal. I do think it should be said in the same breath as the discount, not in a footnote after the election.
States watching this will run their own math. Some may pile on with a state holiday to share the credit. Others will refuse, because their transportation budgets are already patched. A driver crossing a state line could see two different “federal” outcomes layered on two different state choices. The sign will not explain the layers. The driver will just mutter.
Putting The Pieces Back On One Page
Strip the week down and it holds three moves. A public maybe on the federal gasoline tax. A concrete, narrow order on dyed diesel and penalty relief for highway use, with a review of deferrals through year-end. And a claim that Hormuz flows are back to, or above, the prewar pace, set against a rival claim that the lane stays closed until conditions are met. Around those moves sits a documented pile of disruptions: tanker attacks, an export blockade, pipeline hits, trouble near Bab el-Mandeb, and strikes on Russian oil infrastructure.
The maybe is the part that will travel farthest, because 18.4 cents is easy to say. The diesel order may travel farther into actual costs, because freight marks up everything else. The flow claim will be settled by cargo, not by microphones. And the disruption pile is why a gallon can sit at $4.36 even on a day when someone insists the strait is fine.
If you want a single habit for the next month, make it this. Separate the wedge from the log. Cheer a real wedge if it shows up on your receipt. Do not let the wedge convince you the log was moved. Roads still need funding. Refineries still need to run. Ships still need to arrive insured and on time. The sign on the corner will report the score whether anyone in Washington likes the number or not.
That Tuesday fill-up is still the cleanest test I know. Not the speech. Not the reply from across the aisle. The number, the gallons, the receipt. Everything else is commentary we add so the number feels explained. Some weeks the commentary is sharp. This week it is a maybe, a dye rule, and a strait that two capitals describe in opposite words. The pump, rude as ever, has not been asked for its opinion. It will give one anyway.
