More than a year ago I began to think that I must have a gas leak or that my car was burning gas excessively. My gas wasn’t going as far and I needed gas more often. The problem wasn’t my car. The price of gas had gone up. The Covid epidemic and supply chain backlogs had started showing up at the gas pump. Adam Smith’s creation, the giant invisible hand of supply and demand, had slapped us all in the pocketbook.
Now prices are going up even more because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The United States doesn’t get much oil from Russia, but President Biden has announced sanctions to ban Russian oil exports. American prices will go up, not because of the direct impact, but because of global economic forces. The more the United States and Europe sanction Russian oil, the more Russian oil does not get sold and must, therefore, remain in Russian warehouses, sidelining Russia’s share in the market and the profits from it. That’s the right thing to do at this point in time.
President Biden has promised to do everything he can to lessen the economic impact here in America, and I believe he will try.
Gas prices are painfully high and predicted to go higher. Bloviators in the political arena are wagging their prodigious fingers in an effort to get us to assign the blame.
Proposed: Let’s tighten up our belts and support sanctions against the Russian invasion. Don’t make the price of gas a political football.
Americans for Prosperity is an organization that promotes decentralized Invisible Hands of voluntary buyers and sellers over the iron fist of government coercion. Here is AFP’s take:
https://americansforprosperity.org/biden-policies-raising-gas-prices/
Thanks for the interesting article, Richard. After reading it one would be led to believe that America’s only important litmus test is our stance on oil and that President Biden is ruining our great country with his policy stances in that regard.
What the article neglects to mention is that President Biden is calling for some retrenchment of his policies due to the perfect storm of Covid supply line problems and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The article is not a fair accounting of the current situation and the ramifications thereof. It’s a partisan hack job.