Biden’s Hail Mary Attempt At Lowering Gas Prices In An Election Year
NORMAN LEAHY - MAY 30, 2024

One surefire way to tell it’s an election year, and the incumbent president is in trouble?

Joe Biden answers both questions with a stunt for the ages. As CNBC reports, the president has ordered the release of one million gallons of gasoline in the Northeast to help keep prices down during the summer driving season.

No. It’s not a joke:

“By strategically releasing this reserve in between Memorial Day and July 4th, we are ensuring sufficient supply flows to the tri-state [region] and northeast at a time hardworking Americans need it the most,” Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said in a statement Tuesday.
The release comes in the face of…declining gasoline prices: …gas prices have eased in recent weeks as oil has pulled back from April highs hit when traders bid up crude futures on fears that Israel and OPEC member Iran were on the brink of war.

Prices at the pump averaged $3.59 per gallon nationwide on Tuesday, about 4 cents higher than the year-ago average but lower than last month, according to the motorist association AAA.

Just in case the theatrical nature of this is lost on anyone…the U.S. Energy Information Administration notes that in 2022, the U.S. as a whole used “135.73 billion gallons of gasoline.” According to the Federal Highway Administration’s wholesalers reports, New York state (one part of the “tri-state area” getting the million barrels of Uncle Sam’s gasoline) had more than 5.2 billion gallons flow through the system in 2022.

As the Washington Post reports: The gas is expected to provide some cost relief at the pump over the July Fourth weekend. But not very much, as the 42 million gallons of gasoline the administration will sell amounts to just a small fraction of the gasoline sold in a single day in the United States.

To call this cheap political theater, then, is an insult to cheap political theater. In reality, Biden’s tri-state gas relief scheme barely rises to the level of a crude pun.

Shocking.

Indeed, would have been shocking had this not been done.

Expect more oil to be released from the (critically low) SPR as well as the election approaches.

Demos are good at this stuff, and they are cleaning our clock.