Biden trying to manipulate gas prices before election

 National Review:

Joe Biden has been abusing his authority as president to aid his party in the midterm elections. We know, we know — we need to be more specific. This time, it’s the abuse of his powers as commander in chief in negotiating with Saudi Arabia and in drawing down the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

Democrats have a gas-price problem. High gas prices are the most visible sign of inflation, as well as a driver of inflation in the prices of many goods. The average price of a gallon of regular gas is $3.87, and while that is down from the historic high of $5.02 in June, it is still noticeably higher than the $3.33 price of a year ago or the $3.68 price of a month ago. Biden bet heavily on the decline after June’s high as proof that inflation was over, so the recent spike has driven the White House into a panic with only three weeks until Election Day. Moreover, the obvious solution to high gas prices — increasing domestic production — is ideologically anathema to the people around the president.

What Biden is pursuing instead is any avenue to temporarily increase supply just until Election Day. The one domestic lever he has is the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which was designed in 1975 to ensure adequate fuel supply for the military and essential industries in case of a foreign conflict that interrupts the flow of oil — say, a conflict with Russia. Presidents have too often treated the SPR as a piggy bank to soften gas-price spikes at politically inconvenient times, but never at the scale that Biden is doing now.

Biden is set to announce this week more releases of oil from the SPR, following similar announcements in early October, and nobody has the slightest illusion as to why. Reuters, breaking the news based on administration sources, described it as “a bid to dampen fuel prices before next month’s congressional elections.” Bloomberg said the “efforts come as gasoline prices set off alarms before election.” CNN said that “officials have closely eyed Biden’s ability to trigger new releases within the bounds of the initial program as Election Day looms.”
...

Biden's gas gambit is a threat to national security when he could be drilling more oil to lower the price to the level it was when Trump was President.  Trump was smart enough to allow drilling on Federally controlled sites.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Washington Post: Some Democrats eye adding more justices to the Supreme Court to change its ideological bent The once-remote idea has gained the attention of liberals angered by the GOP push to remake the federal courts. Probably the easy way to defeat this court-packing scheme is for Trump to propose doing the same thing now.  It would lead to Democrat denunciations and claims that it would be wrong, thereby blowing up any attempt by them in the unfortunate event of Democrats winning a presidential election.
Read more

29 % of companies say they are unlikely to keep insurance after Obamacare

Conn Carroll: A new survey of 368 midsize to large companies found that 29% of them are considering terminating their active employee health care plans when Obamacare is full implemented in 2014. Only 71% of employers surveyed said they did not expect to drop their health coverage, while 20% said they did not know and 9% said they were planning to exit. The latest survey, conducted by Towers Watson, echoes an ealier survey by McKinsey & Co. finding that 30% of private-sector employers were planning to drop their employee health insurance coverage by 2014. When the Congressional Budget Office crunched Obamacare's spending numbers, they estimated that only 7% of employees currently covered by employer-sponsored plans would lose their plans. ... This means the cost of the health care fiasco will be hundreds of billions more than estimated by the CBO and Congressional Democrat. It is also clear that Obama's pledge that you could keep your health care plan if you wanted t
Read more