TWO BLOOMBERGS IN ONE!
Shot:
Gasoline prices across America have fallen for 60 consecutive days. It’s the longest downward streak in more than a year and one which has arrived just in time for the holiday shopping season. Now that drivers aren’t forking over so much cash at the pump, retailers are hoping they’ll hand over the savings at the mall instead. A gallon of gasoline now costs $3.25 on average, more than 60 cents below the year’s peak in mid-September and about 30 cents cheaper than this time last year, according to data from the American Automobile Association. In 14 states, average prices are now less than $3 a gallon. Cheaper pump prices aren’t exactly good news in the struggle to slow global warming, but they’re likely welcome by President Joe Biden, whose reelection campaign has been based in part on the economy’s resilience through the pandemic, record low unemployment and steadily slowing inflation. While some polls indicate that last bit has yet to register with most consumers, lower gas prices are about as high profile as it gets. And one sign that cash is already flowing from gas stations to PlayStations came this weekend: US consumers spent a record $9.8 billion online during Black Friday.
—“Cheap gas for Christmas,” Bloomberg Evening [Email] Briefing, today.
Chaser: The Earth Wants Biden to Keep Gas Prices High. There’s one bold move President Biden could make to curb climate change: Find a way to put a $5-a-gallon floor on gasoline prices.
—Headline, Bloomberg.com, July 20th, 2022.
Flashbacks:
● 2008 L.A. Times headline: “The joy of $8 gas.”
● “Under my plan, energy costs will necessarily skyrocket…”
In other words, Obama administration retreads are following the same playbook as the original Obama administration: “We’re going to keep at it to ensure the American people are paying their fair share for gas,” is the perfect Kinsley Gaffe for an Obama administration retread like Biden: As Steven Chu, Obama’s then-incoming energy secretary, told the Wall Street Journal in the fall of 2008: “Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.”
So despite Biden claiming last year that high gas prices are Putin’s fault, is it fair to ask if Biden himself is on the payroll of Putin? As Walter Russell Mead wrote in 2017:
If Trump were the Manchurian candidate that people keep wanting to believe that he is, here are some of the things he’d be doing:
Limiting fracking as much as he possibly could
Blocking oil and gas pipelines
Opening negotiations for major nuclear arms reductions
Cutting U.S. military spending
Trying to tamp down tensions with Russia’s ally Iran.
“Yep,” Glenn added in late 2019. “You know who did do these things? Obama. You know who supports these things now? Democrats.”
● Team Biden might be purposefully grinding down the middle class.