Many people on my TV and a few on my phone seem incapable lately of forming sentences without mentioning the soaring price of gasoline. Of course it's bad. And of course we'll pay it because we have no choice.
And of course it has something to do with the fact that we're kinda/sorta/almost in a war — two wars, actually. Just as the War Against COVID seems to be winding down, we now have that thing going on in Ukraine that you may have heard about. Prices always go up when we're in a war.
They often go up when we're not in a war, too. As Eric Boehlert points out in this article, sometimes prices go up because the companies that supply our necessities just plain decide to raise 'em so they can make more money. One of the more obvious examples of that is in Las Vegas where the prices of just about everything — food, shows, hotel rooms, probably hookers too — have soared. And since people seem to have no problem paying those prices, they'll soar some more. Why charge ten bucks for a pizza when people will pay twenty?
I think that's the cause of rising prices way more often than we admit. We too often blame the government, especially when that means we can blame people we'd personally like to see voted out of office. That's the semi-political part of this comment but the main point is the reason so many businesses are raising so many prices: Because they can.