I live in a large city in Ohio. There is a palpable amount of anger directed at Biden because gas prices and inflation are sky high. Trump would win Ohio by 20% again.
And it’s not like house republicans voted AGAINST preventing gas companies from price gouging. But sure, blame Biden…
The idea that this will hasten some green revolution is nonsense. It’s not going to happen, at least not in the next 10 years.
Biden's energy policy has been to shut down domestic production by canceling drilling leases and closing pipelines. Gas was up $1 a gallon long before Putin invaded and the gouging began.
Never mind the fact he didn’t close down a pipeline that barely started getting built — if you vote against price gouging, you’re voting to allow it. The GOP consistently fucks their own constituents — sometimes literally — which is why I still cannot bring myself to vote for them (though I’d like to, hence me watching Cheney). As far as Biden’s energy policy, what he did prior to the price gouging, which it bears repeating was voted against stopping by the GOP, was for environmental reasons. Which I will always support. We are past the point of no return, and now we just need to mitigate whatever damages we can.
Some of the logic behind that was peak oil is over, and fewer folks were driving to work, so the impact wouldn't be as severe on the individual household. Also, with price hikes and rising wages, he figured inflation was a given and could let some of that absorb the negative fallout from the energy policy. The issue that put it over the top was Russia. Biden just didn't to anything to mitigate it, from calling Saudi Arabia a pariah to failing to soften his energy policy. This Jan 6th thing reeks of the mistaken belief that Trump supporters can be swayed by evidence, and God damn there is a ton of it. But....not how that crowd operates.
I'm amazed that people think we could have a pandemic that killed a million Americans despite our efforts, and there would just be... no effect from that? That the measures we took to keep businesses and individuals afloat during a time of huge disruption would have zero hangover? We dropped interest rates and printed money to spread the pain over more years, but now people are acting like the pain can be magically made to not exist.
I think part of the problem is that they know that the American voter thinks that the only thing that ever matters is who the President is at that specific moment in time. Past presidents, Congress, the wider economy, foreign countries, none of them exist. It's all just the work of a single wizard who lives in the White House.
The biggest talking point I’m seeing is that inflation and gas prices are really high everywhere and Putin starting a war causing food shortages and economic strife ain’t helping. Which makes sense. But the opportunist counter argument places the blame squarely at Biden’s feet. Hard to counter that when it is commonly looked at as the person currently in charge is totally responsible. The gop loves talking about Biden’s gas prices and Biden’s inflation. Biden’s baby formula shortage. Any rebuttal to that automatically sounds defensive and full of excuses. Meanwhile oil companies are bragging about record profits during this time. The tinfoil hat in me wouldn’t be surprised if oil companies purposefully fuck with this shit in order to get a Republican back in office to give them favorable tax breaks.
It's the only weapon they have left; with how "politically savvy" people have become the usual lobbying can't slide under the radar anymore. They can't just buy government change, they have to brute force it.
There’s no better way to do it than to directly fuck with peoples ability to either fill their tanks or their stomachs. I’m fortunate enough to work from home so I don’t have to fill up that often. But these poor bastards in lower wage customer-facing jobs are probably seriously hurting right now. Introducing a nuanced argument about the real source of inflation or the supply chain foibles of the oil industry would fall on deaf ears. It’s a Maslows hierarchy of needs breakdown more than a political one. It’s probably why it was reported that Biden is in talks to have a sort of diplomatic reset with the Saudis. Agreeing to move past the Kashoggi thing and hopefully turn up the spigot. A lot of people will cry foul over that but as long as we are still reliant on oil, a deal with a bad actor has to be made somewhere.
I may be wrong, but I imagine oil company profits are a percentage of revenue. Particularly with a product like gas, the price of which can fluctuate tremendously by the day, fluctuate as fast as someone can go out there and change the numbers on the sign. Higher prices due to higher costs equals higher revenue equals higher profits, even though they're still taking the same percentage and fixed costs remain the same. Not that I am defending oil companies, just my thoughts on how we got where we are in regards to their profits.
I was kind of talking in the abstract. Like how you would approach someone struggling right now working a low wage job deciding on eating or putting gas in their car. I just don’t think you’re going to get that person to accept the intricacies of “cost at the pump” when they are in a dire position.
Fucking with what shit? I know the statement of, "oil companies are recording record profits" has been the whitewashing attempt over the last two weeks by the Administration absolve themselves of any blame, but c'mon. Companies have economists on staff just like the government and react accordingly. Fluctuations in prices of crude oil per barrel do not cause inflation, but bad monetary policy certainly can. Economists saw this coming almost 18 months ago, and the government pretended it wasn't. Companies saw the same writing on the wall, and accepted that it was. There is almost no scenario where a secret cabal of companies would benefit from inflation or supply chain disruption. So we should accept that the Fed, run by Jerome Powell, who was originally put in charge by Trump and kept by Biden, implemented bad policy decisions and did not react accordingly. The claim about "record profits" is only really true if you omit the fact that they saw quarter-over-quarter losses during the pandemic. ExxonMobil, for example, made a "record" $23B+ profit 2021, but that's after $22B in losses in 2020. That said, it is not all of Biden's fault. There are two main types of inflation scenarios: Demand-Pull and Cost-Push (there's a third type, but it's not relevant here). Demand-Pull inflation is where we are now, and is due to supply chain changes, not corporate greed. Production just isn't meeting demand. Another factor is that the cost of labor skyrocketed. Baby Boomer retirements + COVID jacked up the cost of labor very quickly, not to mention removing a ton of disposable income from the market at the same time. So its a combination of bad policy combined with rapidly changing market conditions after a long period of cheap money. Corporate greed doesn't have a lot to do with it. Then again, Bilderberg is this week, so maybe?
I mean it's corporate greed in the sense that corporations are always greedy. The pandemic created a massive drop in demand, which the oil companies responded to with various types of belt tightening. Now that the demand is rebounding, they're ramping back up not on the schedule that is optimal for low gas prices, but on the schedule that is optimal for their profits. No need to pay extra to get capacity back on line quicker or pay extra to hire workers immediately when their numbers guys have crunched it and said that the optimal balance point when moving from lower volume/higher margin to higher volume/lower margin is the one they've opted for.
There's definitely more than just this at play re: global inflation (although a global jump in gas prices will obviously have at least some inflationary effect). My point was more that this trajectory has been baked in for a while, and has its roots in the pandemic, the effects of which I think most people are still massively underrating. There seems to be this attitude of "the pandemic is over, we buried Nana last year, it was no big deal, so there's no way it could be affecting the economy."
This isn't limited to an oil company thing, but you are correct in the assumption that businesses engage more actively when there's a "friendly" administration in office. I saw this play out with some of the work done in the business emergency ops stuff. The same folks who were at the table in 2017 are incommunicado now.