President Joe Biden administration’s made a series of massive miscalculations on everything from foreign policy to domestic spending – but a new report exposes what may have been its biggest error of all
It’s the price of gas.
Town Hall found a prediction from December that could haunt the administration come November’s midterm election, showing a basic lack of competence on a core issue.
“We forecast that retail gasoline prices will average $3.13/gal in December before falling to $3.01/gal in January and $2.88/gal on average in 2022,” the U.S. Energy Information Administration wrote in a December 2021 report.
Biden’s hand-picked experts at the U.S. Department of Energy… supposedly the best minds his team could find for setting and maintaining policy… believed fuel prices would drop this year.
Instead, of course, the opposite has happened.
Fuel prices now top $5 a gallon on average, and in some parts of the nation are well north of $6 a gallon.
Californians now pay an average of $6.43 a gallon, according to the latest AAA survey.
Biden has blamed just about everyone and everything else, from Donald Trump to the coronavirus to the oil industry.
He’s even blamed Russian President Vladimir Putin, despite the fact that fuel prices were jumping long before Russia invaded Ukraine in February.
“There is no question that Vladimir Putin is principally responsible for the intense financial pain the American people and their families are bearing,” Biden insisted just this week. “But amid a war that has raised gasoline prices more than $1.70 per gallon, historically high refinery profit margins are worsening that pain.”
The fuel crisis has forced Biden to eat crow in a number of ways… including a head-spinning turnaround on Saudi Arabia.
During the 2020 campaign, Biden had vowed to turn the oil-producing giant into a pariah state over its human rights abuses including the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi.
Instead, Biden has practically begged the nation to help ease fuel prices.
He finally convinced the Saudis to modestly increase OPEC production – but he has to visit the nation next month in return, in what will no doubt look like a hat-in-hand visit.
“There’s no way around the fact that the Saudi trip marks a reversal of President Biden’s original effort to downgrade the bilateral relationship while humiliating and ostracizing Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman,” John Hannah, a former national security adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney, told Fox News Digital.
Hannah added that Biden’s empty “virtue signaling” on Saudi Arabia might’ve played well among progressives. But in the real world, as rising gas prices show, the move “backfired miserably when it came to serving U.S. national interests.”
Now, Biden is getting it from both sides – while the right mocks him for caving to Saudi interests, the left is outraged that he’s showing up there at all.
But he may not have much choice.
So far, none of Biden’s other moves have helped tame the price of gas or inflation, and there’s nothing to suggest American consumers will see any relief anytime soon.
Even those who support Biden have been forced to hem and haw.
“I think we’re in a really difficult position, because we don’t have successful precedents for having an economy this red hot in terms of low unemployment and high inflation and not having a recession,” Larry Summers, who was treasury secretary under Bill Clinton and director of the National Economic Council under Barack Obama, told the Washington Post. “It’s going to very, very difficult to achieve a soft landing.”
In other words, Americans should be prepared for more pain – both at the pump and beyond.
— Walter W. Murray is a reporter for The Horn News. He is an outspoken conservative and a survival expert.