President Biden comes out swinging
While the GOP likes to complain about the rising cost of fuel, they also don’t really care to do anything about it – something that likely won’t change however the elections end up going. House Democrats, however, have passed legislation to crack down on price gouging when it happens while many House Republicans refused to vote on it. They’ve also complained about President Biden’s decision to open oil reserves to try to lower prices and his upcoming summit with Saudi Arabia in order to increase production in the Middle East, reversing Trump policies that caused Saudis to reduce their productivity.
On Tuesday, President Biden took things a step further, writing a letter to oil executives at seven of the country’s largest refineries, calling for them to increase their production capacity while Americans are facing high fuel costs at the pump and companies reaping massive profits as a result.
“Vladimir Putin’s war of aggression, and the bipartisan and global effort to counter it, has disrupted the global supply of oil and driven up the global price. But the sharp rise in gasoline prices is not driven only by rising oil prices, but by an unprecedented disconnect between the price of oil and the price of gas. … That difference — of more than 15% at the pump — is the result of the historically high profit margins for refining oil into gasoline, diesel and other refined products,” Biden wrote.
We’re already seeing some slight drop in gas prices, something that will hopefully continue to go down as production increases, but Republicans complaining about the president doing anything at all about the situation is just further acknowledgement that they’re powerless when it comes to impacting gas prices. They only benefit if they have problems to run on – and that’s an important message to spread when we turn out to beat them at the polls in 2022.
James Sullivan is the assistant editor of Brain World Magazine and an advocate of science-based policy making