If you’ve had to fill up your car since Joe Biden became President, you’re probably all too familiar with the Biden Bounce. While gas prices may not be as high today as they were a couple months ago, they’re still more than a dollar a gallon more expensive than a year ago, and significantly higher than they were two years ago.
President Biden has done everything he can to try not to take responsibility for those rising gas prices, despite the fact that his administration has done everything it can to discourage fossil fuel production and use. Now that the effects of the Fed’s monetary policy plus the Biden administration’s anti-fossil fuel policies have resulted in pain at the pump that could hurt him politically, Biden is having to backtrack.
One way that Biden has tried to make political hay despite the high gas prices is by releasing oil from the US government’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve. The thinking goes that by releasing oil from the SPR to the open market, it can help alleviate high prices. But there’s just one problem: that oil is being purchased and sent overseas.
In fact, since last September a single Chinese firm with ties to Hunter Biden has bought nearly six million barrels of oil from SPR releases, including those emergency releases that occurred after Russia invaded Ukraine. So the oil that was supposed to be reducing gas prices here in the US instead was sent to Communist China to help their industry and their people, while ordinary Americans were left high and dry.
These kind of boondoggles seem to be par for the course for Biden and his administration, however, as the administration seems hell-bent on pushing its ideology no matter the consequences. So not only do we taxpayers get to foot the bill for buying and maintaining the oil in the SPR, we also get to watch as that oil gets sold to foreigners while we suffer at the pumps. Ain’t life under Biden grand?