Hey, hope you’ve had a great week. Unfortunately that might depend on when you last put gas in your car. Prices are surging and more inflation could be on the way — we’ll break it all down below, plus:

First though, is there any relief ahead at the pump? Let’s take a closer look at the gas tax.  — Tony Wagner, newsletter editor

PS: Marketplace’s brand-new “Liquid Assets” Nalgene can be yours this weekend only by donating just $5 a month! Become a Marketplace Investor today to make sure you get one, this deal won’t last!

President Donald Trump has proposed suspending the federal gas tax as prices at the pump have jumped following the start of the Iran War. But would that really make a meaningful difference for cash-strapped consumers?

Gas prices rose 5.4% between March and April, pushing April’s year-over-year inflation to 3.8% — its highest level in three years, according to Labor Department data. Meanwhile, AAA gas price tracker shows that the average price of gasoline stands at over $4.50, which is about 43% higher than it was last year.

Americans have to pay more for their daily commute, while farmers are facing rising fertilizer and fuel costs.

But pausing the gas tax (a move that would require Congressional approval) won’t help U.S. consumers or farmers, and will end up worsening the national deficit, experts told Marketplace.

The federal tax currently stands at 18.4 cents per gallon of gas and 24.4 cents per gallon of diesel fuel. Getting that money back just won’t make a meaningful difference when gas prices have gone up by 40% or even higher in some parts of the country, said Gilbert Metcalf, a visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management.

Suspending the gas tax also won’t help farmers because they already get an exemption from the gas tax, Metcalf said.

“If eliminating the tax leads to a little bit more demand for gasoline, then that's just going to drive up the pre-tax price, which will just hurt farmers yet again,” Metcalf said.

Undergraduate students are turning away from the humanities, and some colleges are following suit by closing those programs.

Between 2015 and 2024, the share of all bachelor’s degrees awarded in the humanities dropped from 10.9% to 8.5%, replaced by a larger share of STEM degrees.

Different colleges shut down programs for different reasons. Some, like Syracuse University, are closing programs with low enrollment. In Ohio and Indiana, state law mandates public colleges shutter programs that graduate few students. Smaller schools, like Earlham College, change curriculum when their budgets are crunched.

Students have their own reasons for changing majors. They generally want their education to lead to jobs, especially with the college sticker price rising, and an uncertain job market ahead.

But if Middle Eastern studies and fine arts are only offered by elite universities with large endowments, and only to students who can afford to study them, that would subvert the democratic purpose of higher education, Syracuse humanities chair Gregg Lambert said.

“These are programs that are being closed precisely at the moment that I think we need more,” he said. “I don’t see that these kinds of knowledge are going to be able to exist outside a university environment.”

Rosie Jacobson, who graduated from Earlham College in 2010 with a degree in sociology/anthropology that will now no longer exist, worries future students will miss out on a well-rounded college experience.

“I feel deeply sad that other people might not be able to have that experience,” she said. “And that other young weirdos are not going to be challenged and invited into a legacy of thought the way that I was.”

Pat Cummings remembers his favorite Preakness race. “Smarty Jones winning in 2004. I grew up in Philadelphia, and it was just such incredible that because a Philadelphia horse had won it.”

Cummings is executive director of the National Thoroughbred Alliance. He bets on horses all the time. So does Jon Stettin, founder and publisher of Past the Wire .

“My mom was at the racetrack the day before I was born and at the racetrack about four or five days after I was born with me in a stroller,” he said.

Back then, you bet in person. Now, you don’t even have to be at the track; you can bet online, but all through platforms okayed by the racing industry. That doesn’t include prediction markets.

Saturday is the Preakness Stakes, the second event in the “Triple Crown” (which also includes the Kentucky Derby). Americans have been able to bet on horse racing longer than any other sport , but interest has waned. Over the last couple of decades, betting on racing has declined by more than 50%.

You might think prediction markets would see this as fertile ground. Even though sports betting on platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket is surging, they have not made inroads in horse racing.

“For the industry, it's better to lock them out and just keep all the money for themselves and restrict where I wager,” Stettin explained.

Spotify, the app that would soon swallow the music industry whole and turn it into a subscription service, was born 20 years ago.

To celebrate, the company is leveraging the data behind its viral “wrapped” feature to show users not just what they’ve listened to in a given year, but their whole time on the app. It’s also released new data that sheds light on how the world listens.

Some of this is predictable — newsflash, Taylor Swift is huge — but we’re interested in all the “work sucks” playlists out there. Spotify collated them and found “9 to 5” is one of the most frequently featured, along with Blink 182’s “All The Small Things” natch and “Sugar, We’re Goin Down” by Fall Out Boy. Personally, I’m partial to Cam’ron.

But we had to give it up this week to the queen of country music, theme parks and public radio, Dolly Parton. I highly recommend this pocket history of “9 to 5,” the movie and the song. Read to the end for a wild, Marketplace-y cover by Tune-Yards.