Map of life expectancy at birth from Global Education Project.

Saturday, March 12, 2022

Like I said

Because of the NYT paywall, I'll give you Digby's repost of a Krugman column, which is not fair use but I suppose they can sue her if they want to. 


Anyway, the price of  gasoline and diesel fuel is determined almost entirely by the cost of crude oil. Crude oil is sold on a global market, and guess what? The price of crude oil and fuels derived therefrom has increased the world over, by the same amount. This has happened in the UK, in Germany, and in every other country in the world where Joe Biden is not president. As Krugman explains:

[R]ising gas prices in America are part of a global story that has nothing to do with the policies of the current administration. Still, can’t the United States have some impact on that global story? We are, after all, the world’s largest oil producer, accounting for about 20 percent of world output in 2020. Can’t America do something to reduce global oil prices?

Yes, in principle. Not so much in practice.

U.S. oil production did increase a lot after 2010 — a trend that, as it happens, began under the Obama administration and continued for part of Donald Trump’s term.

But this had little to do with policy; it was all about new technology, specifically fracking. Oil production then slumped in 2020, not because of policy but because prices plunged during the pandemic. Now it’s coming back, again thanks to events rather than policy. It seems safe to say that nothing either Trump did or Biden did has had any appreciable effect on U.S. oil production, let alone U.S. gasoline prices.

Of course, that’s not what Republicans would have you believe. They want the public to give Trump credit for low prices in 2020, when demand for oil was low because Covid had the world economy on its back. They want voters to blame environmental concerns, which have blocked the Keystone XL pipeline and might block drilling on public land, for high prices at the pump right now — even though it will take years before these policy changes will have any effect, and that effect will be modest even then.

I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised. After all, we’re talking about a party that’s in denial about everything from climate change to vaccine effectiveness, so what’s a bit of economic nonsense thrown into the mix? But somehow I find myself shocked all the same. For you don’t need scientific understanding or even rudimentary statistical analysis to see that President Biden can’t possibly be responsible for high U.S. gasoline prices; all you need to do is spend five minutes looking at what’s happening in the rest of the world.

 

Doesn't matter. They lie, all the time, about everything. It works.

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