Wednesday's Absurdity of the Day: Biden Desperate to Shift Blame for High Gas Prices

Joe Biden, desperate to deflect blame for the high energy prices his Green New Deal policies have inflicted on the American people, on Wednesday ordered the Federal Trade Commission to look into allegations that market of gasoline have engaged in anti-competitive practices that supposedly helped to cause the rising prices at the pump.

This is abject nonsense, as a colleague in Washington, DC wrote today:

As we have noted before, allegations of anti-competitive behavior and market manipulation is nothing new in oil and gas markets. It is well studied by the FTC. In fact, over the past 20 years, the FTC has issued nearly 50 reports on the subject. If there were problems, the FTC would have found it a long time ago.

But for sake of argument, let’s assume President Biden’s letter to the FTC is correct and nefarious gasoline marketers have artificially inflated the price of gasoline by 8 percent. The reality is that nobody would be complaining about the price of gasoline if it were only 8 percent higher. They are complaining because the price of gasoline is up 43 percent since Inauguration Day ($3.41 a gallon today versus $2.39 a gallon on Inauguration Day).  

But it gets worse when we look at the price of crude oil because WTI is up 48 percent since Inauguration Day ($79.87 versus $53.98). In other words, the price of gasoline is up less than the price of benchmark crude in the U.S., but the President is still asking the FTC to investigate. This is absurd.  

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It certainly is that, but it is more than that, too: It is deceitful, knowingly so.

As my friend points out, allegations of price gouging by refiners and marketers of gasoline and other products refined from crude oil in the U.S. have been investigated and studied ad nauseum. Ordering investigations like this one has been a standard practice of every administration in modern history anytime consumers become upset about rising retail gas prices.

To my knowledge, none of those myriad investigations have produced a shred of evidence of collaboration by refiners or marketers in all that time. On the other hand, there have been isolated instances of price gouging by individual, privately-owned gas stations during times of crisis, such as the aftermath of hurricane Katrina and other natural disasters. That is not the same thing, and the President’s evil handlers are well aware of that.

One other stark reality that is leading to so much public anger, related to my friend’s point that the average price per gallon has risen by 43% since inauguration day. If you go back to Election Day 2020, which the speculative oil markets first began to price in the cost of the Biden policies they knew would be coming, the price per gallon has gone up from $2.11 to $3.41, an increase of 62%.

You want to know why those Biden “I did that!” stickers are popular? There you go

That is all.