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[Giantone]

I'll put this here but I know chico won't read it.



GOP attacks on Biden for high gas prices don't add up, expert says



https://news.yahoo.com/gop-attacks-o...161903465.html


Since President Biden announced on Tuesday that the U.S. would ban imports of Russian oil as punishment for its invasion of Ukraine, several Republican politicians have attempted to blame him for rising gas prices.

On Wednesday, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy delivered a speech in which he asserted that Russia's invasion of Ukraine was not the reason for high gas prices — Biden's energy policies were. To back up his claim, McCarthy asserted that gas prices "started rising the day President Biden took office."

Yahoo News reached out to Christopher Knittel, a professor of applied economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management, to help explain whether the Republican criticisms of Biden hold water.

"The first thing is, that’s factually inaccurate," Knittel said. "Gas prices actually started rising in November of the previous year. That’s just data, so you can graph gas prices and you’ll see them starting to trend up in November of 2020."

Knittel noted that there "is no evidence" Biden's inauguration "broke the trend in gas prices," and pointed back to the early days of the pandemic, when the price of oil dropped precipitously as the world went into lockdown to try to slow the spread of the coronavirus.

“What everybody seems to be forgetting, and it’s shocking that they are, is in April of 2020 the futures price of oil was negative. It had never happened in the history of oil markets. We had a negative price," Knittel said. "People were paying others to take their oil. That is a huge disincentive to drill for more oil. The low prices, generally, that happened during the pandemic and up until the end of 2020 created a huge disincentive to drill oil. Despite that, we’ve seen U.S. production increase over the past year. Why hasn’t it increased more? Because oil companies are leery of drilling for more oil — certainly they were during the pandemic — and that’s a market effect. It has nothing to do with President Biden.”