Editors at Issues and Insights offer advice to voters who seek lower gas prices.
You can’t open a newspaper or watch cable news these days without seeing a story about the pain and suffering Americans are feeling at the pump, with scary headlines such as “no relief in sight” and “the worst is yet to come.”
Actually, when it comes to gas prices, the worst has come and gone – three times – all while Democrats were in the White House. Not that you’d ever know that from the mainstream media.
Shortly after those headlines ran, gas prices started to moderate. AAA says they are down by about 10 cents a gallon from a week ago. That’s not much, but it’s far from “soaring.”
And while it’s true that President Donald Trump’s attacks on the Iranian regime have pushed oil prices sharply upward, you have to consider everything in context.
When news reports talk about “record high” prices, they aren’t accounting for inflation. When you do that, today’s prices are far from the highest they’ve ever been.
As a reader service, we compiled monthly data on real (inflation-adjusted) gas prices starting in 1977 – the year Jimmy Carter took office.
We then averaged them for each administration. …
… Except for the Clinton administration, prices have been unusually high under Democrats, and relatively low under Republicans.
Reagan’s average is on the high end because he inherited sky-high gas prices from Jimmy “Malaise” Carter. When Reagan came into office, gas was over $5 a gallon in today’s dollars. The month he left office, it was $2.40.
Clinton, in contrast, inherited low prices from George H.W. Bush, which were $2.48 in his first month in office but were on their way up when he left – averaging $2.9 a gallon in his last year.
Although you’d never know it from the coverage, Barack Obama presided over stratospheric prices for the entirety of his two terms in office – when they averaged $4.32 a gallon. Democrats weren’t complaining, and the media treated it as an inevitability while Obama chanted that “you can’t drill your way to cheap gas.”
The post Democrats and the future of gas prices appeared first on John Locke Foundation.
