Just a quick letter today, because I wanted to cover two things I’m really getting tired of seeing.
Gas prices, and the immigration crisis.
Neither of these things are worth talking about in any political context whatsoever, but they have dominated the conservative echochamber for a couple weeks now.
There are really important discussion to be had about each of these, but they are economic and humanitarian discussions. Instead, they have been turned into a political talking point against President Biden. Why? Because those using these talking points hope you won’t take a few minutes to look at actual data, and will repeat the talking points because they are trendy.
Yes, gas prices are higher. No, Biden isn’t to blame. Presidents have, at best, a vanishingly small influence over gas prices because most of our gas still comes from overseas. If you were told that Trump achieved ‘Energy Independence’ you were misled. Energy Independence means we use 100% American made (drilled, produced, refined, mined, etc) energy: this was never the case. What happened under Trump was that the United States became a net energy exporter, meaning we exported more energy than we imported.
Most of our energy exports are in natural gas and coal, not petroleum. The bulk of petroleum used for transportation is—and was still under Trump—imported from oil producing counties.
Because of this, US policy does not have a huge impact on oil prices—Keystone XL Pipeline or not.
The jump in gas prices has to do with travel patterns returning to pre pandemic levels, as people begin to return to a more normal life as Covid spread has fallen and vaccination keeps rising.
This has nothing to do with Biden, unless you want to credit him with getting the United States open again…but I’m fairly certain that isn’t the goal of those griping about gas.
Here’s your proof. A barrel of oil is now back up to the sky high prices of—wait for it—2019.
Yes. It may seem like a lifetime ago, after a year of quarenteening, but this is how high gas prices were before the pandemic. This is actually lower than oil prices were in 2018, right in the heart of what Trump insisted was the greatest economy ever.
To further illustrate the point, look at the price of oil in starting in 2011, the year the Tea Party won huge margins, helping the Republicans take control of Congress.
The recession caused gas prices to fall, and beginning in 2011, as the Tea Party Republicans were sworn into office, the price jumped about 40%.
And it didn’t matter.
Because the price of gas is not determined in DC.
Gas has already started to come back down in the last week because oil producing countries are starting to produce more oil. They had slowed production because demand had fallen sharply during the pandemic. Now, travel picking back up is kicking up demand. Oil producers are starting to respond by producing more oil to meet that demand. Biden doesn’t matter.
The border crisis is also another big wad of nothing (again, politically speaking) that is being overblown for political points.
I’m sure you can guess where I’m going with this. If you actually look at the data, border apprehensions are right back to where they were in the Summer of 2019—lower, in fact.
They may peak higher than 2019 in the coming months, but this graph should hopefully demonstrate that it wouldn’t reach the level of ‘crisis’ I keep hearing politicians scream about. Central America has been battered by storms and hurricanes in recent months, so some uptick in migration is expected. So, add together these two things—that migration is still lower than the pre pandemic peak, and severe storm damage has created an outflow of Central Americans—and it should be pretty clear that Biden has not created any kind of border crisis.
One final point, because, I’m me, and I talk a lot.
Something my conservative friends rarely understand is just how much my liberal friends also hate the mainstream media. This is a perfect example of why. It only took me 20 minutes and a few hundred words to definitively show that Biden’s crises are not crises. But, crisis sells. So, at least in the view of my liberal friends, the mainstream media dumps on Biden to make a buck, rather than tell the truth.
I hear my liberal friends complain about this a lot; that media companies are carrying the water for factually faulty conservatives. From the level of violence in the BLM protests to take-your-pick or Hillary Clinton’s scandals, my liberal friends consistently complain that the media does to them what my conservative friends all say it did to Trump.
Hillary’s email scandal was actually studied. This issue alone got more media coverage in the 2016 campaign than any of Trump’s scandals. By almost double.
It might surprise you to learn that her email usage was reviewed by the State Department, which found that she had done nothing wrong. Dido for Benghazi.
Contrast that with, not only the Mueller Report, but the Republican led Senate Intelligence Committee investigation which found Trump and his organization were far from free and clear, and you can get a sense of where liberals are coming from.
Gas prices and border crises are just a few more points of data my liberal friends will point to.
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