Pointing fingers for gas prices

Politicians' fingers, it seems, have a magnetic polarity of north, just like their chest, while anyone not in the same tribe has a polarity of south.

Someone wondering how he can afford these prices. Just wait until he finds out he's not in the Red Light District. // photo by Rheyan Glenn Dela Cruz Manggob

Unless you've been living under a rock or driving an electric car while wearing blinders, you've noticed gas prices increasing for a year or two now. Of course, gas prices had a massive spike right after Russia invaded Ukraine. Where I live, gas prices went from $5.29 to $6.29 per gallon over the course of a week or two, causing GasBuddy to crash due to high traffic.

But if you're Joe Biden, you think gas prices only went up after Russia invaded Ukraine, as he sought to pin the gas price spike entirely on Putin, amid his struggling poll numbers. He's not wrong that the invasion caused upward pressure on prices. The United States imports 20% of its oil supply and 8% of that is from Russia. That should hardly account for the entirety of the 20% price increase since the invasion and the doubling of average prices across the nation over the past two years. To suggest otherwise is like blaming all of the water damage in your walls on your kids throwing a water balloon in the house yesterday when the water damage had been visible and getting worse over the last month due to a major pipe leak in the wall.

Inflation has, over the course of the pandemic, caused prices to go up, not just in gas prices, but for goods across the board, as the US government printed trillions of dollars to chase a number of goods that could not possibly have gone up at a rate in the same stratosphere. The general difficulty of working during the pandemic, much caused by government restrictions that Biden pushed, likely contributed to the gas prices.

Early in his presidency, Biden decided that attacking domestic oil production to make it more expensive was the best move to make. A battle to reset the costs of climate change to a significantly higher number resulted in a court ruling that paused new oil leases that occurred around the same time as the Russia-Ukraine invasion. Those stickers at gas stations showing Biden's face saying "I did that" have at least as much truth as Biden's blame deflection toward Russia.

Artificially increasing gas prices have been in the Democratic Party's playbook for a long time now, with the prevailing theory that increasing prices on fossil fuels will push people toward renewable energy. Now that it has happened and it's primarily hurting the poor, they now flatulate about being against high energy prices.

And so, the Biden Administration has announced that they will release 50 million barrels of oil from the Strategic Oil Reserves to "ease prices". It's like they're just making it up as they go now. Americans use about 20 million barrels of oil a day, so this won't likely do a whole lot, especially considering when this release runs out, we're back to square one and the reserves need to be replenished. But the move at least has some overtures to an admission that yes, reduced supply will increase prices and that higher prices are indeed bad. Of course, they won't relent in their fight against increasing production. To illustrate this insanity, this is like if a few people were stranded on a small desert island and their food is getting scarce, they decide to bust open the one week's worth of meal reserves from the crashed ship that they've been saving for a stormy day. But any move for the highly capable fishermen in the group to go out and catch more fish is met with fierce resistance. For those that have been keeping track, the large increase in gas prices has paused for a few weeks now and has even ticked down a bit, so a few months down the road when peoples' memories become fuzzy, they can falsely claim that their move stopped the gas price increases. "A day late and a dollar short". This is the slogan they should inscribe onto the US currency.

As incoherent as Biden's slalom through energy policy has been, it's not as bad as the insanity from our favorite policy wonk, Elizabeth Warren. Last November, she made a stink about rising gas prices (maybe she should call Biden since he seems oblivious that gas prices rose prior to Putin's invasion). The reason she came up with surprised no one.

Greed!!

Yes, the rising prices were not because of anything else. It's just greed. She outlined the high profits of oil companies while ignoring that the previous year, they held losses and ignored margins that were not anything astronomical. No, we are to believe that just this past year, oil companies suddenly figured out how to be greedy! And when gas prices recede, it's because they're feeling benevolent.

Warren's thought process has many similarities to Jerry Falwell. Why is there famine in the Middle East? God is angry at the gays! There is just no intellectual curiosity to actually think things through and discover causal relationships between actions, but they rather relax their brain and confirm their priors with no further examination of the world.

When gas prices spiked a few summers ago in California, the resounding cry was "greeeeeeed!". Really? Following years of declining gas prices, they rediscovered greed? It's not because of the second-highest gas tax in the country after former governor Jerry Brown passed gas tax hikes in 2017? It's not because a refinery was shut down? And that California's regulations are such that they require blends so expensive that out-of-state refineries generally don't produce what California mandates, resulting in a perpetual shortage that becomes particularly acute when several refineries in California are taken offline?

Unsurprisingly, Warren's simple-mindedness in evaluating problems has an equally simple-minded solution: Wealth tax! Wealth taxes are, of course, incredibly destructive, and will only have one result: even higher gas prices.

Regardless of what the binary thinkers in Washington DC say, it is abundantly clear that the gas prices are due primarily to those exact same binary thinkers and their puppet mouthpieces, and that their actions are the ones that are causing the poorer population to suffer at a far greater clip than the rich. I mean, just listen to Steven Colbert talking about how high gas prices are a price he's willing to pay because he's wealthy enough to own an electric car. Translation: I'm totally for increasing prices on you poor people that need to decide between gas and food because it makes me feel good that we're supposedly creating pain for Putin and I don't have to pay the price for any of it.

The punchline actually is that the policies that push gas prices up don't actually hurt Putin but rather the citizens of Russia, many of whom are against the war as well. But as long as the finger is pointed at someone else, we're supposed to be just fine with letting the most vulnerable suffer. All systems normal.