Want Lower Gas Prices? Don’t Elect A Democrat

You can’t open a newspaper or watch cable news these days without seeing a story about the pain and suffering Americans are feeling at the pump, with scary headlines such as “no relief in sight” and “the worst is yet to come.”

Actually, when it comes to gas prices, the worst has come and gone – three times – all while Democrats were in the White House. Not that you’d ever know that from the mainstream media.

Shortly after those headlines ran, gas prices started to moderate. AAA says they are down by about 10 cents a gallon from a week ago. That’s not much, but it’s far from “soaring.”

And while it’s true that President Donald Trump’s attacks on the Iranian regime have pushed oil prices sharply upward, you have to consider everything in context.

When news reports talk about “record high” prices, they aren’t accounting for inflation. When you do that, today’s prices are far from the highest they’ve ever been.

As a reader service, we compiled monthly data on real (inflation-adjusted) gas prices starting in 1977 – the year Jimmy Carter took office.

We then averaged them for each administration.

What do you see? Except for the Clinton administration, prices have been unusually high under Democrats, and relatively low under Republicans.

Reagan’s average is on the high end because he inherited sky-high gas prices from Jimmy “Malaise” Carter. When Reagan came into office, gas was over $5 a gallon in today’s dollars. The month he left office, it was $2.40.

Clinton, in contrast, inherited low prices from George H.W. Bush, which were $2.48 in his first month in office but were on their way up when he left – averaging $2.9 a gallon in his last year.

Although you’d never know it from the coverage, Barack Obama presided over stratospheric prices for the entirety of his two terms in office – when they averaged $4.32 a gallon. Democrats weren’t complaining, and the media treated it as an inevitability while Obama chanted that “you can’t drill your way to cheap gas.”

But you could. And prices came down sharply under Trump, only to go flying back up Joe “We’re Going to End Fossil Fuels” Biden. Even with the spike in prices from the Iran conflict since Trump came back into office, they are still averaging below where they were under Biden.

Here’s another way to look at it. Over the past 50 years, inflation-adjusted prices topped $5 a gallon in a total of 53 months. A Republican was in the White House in only 14 of those months. Six happened in early 1981, when Reagan was liberating the oil industry from price controls. The others were during the 2008 financial crisis that happened during George W. Bush’s term.

The high prices under Carter, Obama, and Biden were the direct result of bad energy policies. Price controls and rationing in the case of Carter, and the “climate change” war on fossil fuels under Obama and Biden (a war that any future Democratic president will restart).

Now go back and read all those news accounts and see if any of them reflect these realities.

A Sampling of Recent Headlines from ‘Objective’ News Media

• “Americans Have Spent $100 Billion More on Fuel During the Iran War” — Wall Street Journal
• “Consumers Hit By One-Two Punch Of Oil And Rates From Iran War. The Estimated Bill Is $1,700 Per Household” — CNBC
• “‘How Are We Gonna Get Through This?’ Americans Face Tough Decisions As Diesel And Gas Prices Rise” — ABC News
• “No Relief In Sight For U.S. Drivers As Gas And Diesel Prices Surge” — CBS News
• “Gas Prices Are About To Take A Big Jump, Analysts Say, With The Worst Still To Come” — Washington Post

Yes, the war in Iran has pushed prices up, which raises the question of whether it is worth paying more at the pump to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. (We think it is.)

Whatever you think of the war, however, it will end soon enough and, as Ohio Republican Sen. Bernie Moreno said at a Breitbart roundtable, “the second that conflict is down, gas prices will crash.”

Moreno had it exactly right when he followed up by saying, “If you want gas prices to go down, the last thing you should do is allow Democrats to take office, because it’ll make it permanently high. That’s what we saw under Joe Biden, and that’s what we’ll see under whatever lunatic comes next.”

You don’t have to take Moreno’s word for it. Or ours. Just look at the data.

— Written by the I&I Editorial Board

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