Inflation and Truth Telling
Our political system no longer allows for much truth-telling. Media and culture has assigned roles to our political leadership forcing them to play along instead of advocating for what they truly believe.
Elected officials have become props: making faux angry speeches on the floors of Congress, asking performative questions at hearings, or holding up politically incendiary signs at press conferences. We see this on TV, but none of it is real. It’s meant as a PR stunt to engage followers who donate money. So much of our official’s time is spent raising money in windowless rooms that I wonder how they have time for thinking, learning and legislating.
To be fair, much of this is not their fault. Our media/celebrity culture has forced this life on them. But whether they deserve blame or not, the unfortunate result is that so many elected officials cannot say what they really think. Many Republicans, for example, think Trump is a dangerous fool. They say it to each other, but they keep silent in public to protect their office.
Many Democrats, including me, believe that prices for products, including gas, should go higher, not lower and efforts to reduce these costs is a fool’s errand. But political leaders from Biden on down stubbornly hew to the line about lowering prices for the middle-class voter driving a minivan or a pick-up truck.
News flash - prices are going up as Biden, to his credit, warned us when he banned imports of Russian oil because of Putin’s Ukraine invasion.
Political leaders line up to complain about gas prices and rising costs for goods and services. The price of gas in New England is just over $4 per gallon. In 1979, it was just over $2 per gallon, according to AAA. That’s not a huge jump, considering that millions and millions of people plunk down untold amounts for an IPhone.
The truth is when you consider how society drills the ground, extracts oil, ships it across the world, refines it and then trucks it to gas stations, the price of gas is pretty cheap.
And here is where the need to tell the truth runs head-long into the reality of politics and the need to get re-elected.
Gas prices are up because this country has, for too long, rented itself out to dictators and autocrats so we can have cheap goods - gas, cars, computers, toys and food. For 100 years we have compromised our integrity and our position in the world by building an economy based on the mining of a product that kills the planet (coal), while ruining the environment in pursuit of another product (oil) which forces us to be friends with very bad people (Russia and Saudi Arabia).
You think $5 per gallon of gas is expensive? Well, it is not enough. It needs to be $8 per gallon. Maybe then we will stop driving our giant gas guzzling SUV’s that we don’t need. Maybe then we will embrace the electric vehicles that are more powerful and require no gas at all.
Because with every dollar we spend at the gas pump, we subsidize Saudi Arabia, who just executed 81 people last week, and Russia, who is murdering innocent Ukrainian citizens.
The reality is that even with these price hikes, if you factor in the percentage it takes up of our disposable income, gas prices have gone down. Those prices don’t even out-pace inflation.
Biden missed a huge opportunity to truth-tell on this issue. He should have declared a domestic war on oil and accelerated the transformation to a clean energy, low carbon economy. He should have publicly linked the Russian invasion of Ukraine to our thirst for oil - because it is real and true. ****
If the U.S. reduces its dependency on oil, secondary impacts would become apparent. The double speak around the murderous regime in Saudi Arabia would no longer be necessary and relations in Iran would begin to thaw. Just last week, Venezuela released an American political prisoner in a sign that the U.S. could shift its oil purchase to them instead.
If we want prices to go down in the U.S., we need to get real about climate change and the conversion to a carbon-free economy. Governments can institute mandates for electric cars and carbon reductions. They can also incentivize “Buy American’’ practices by forcing Amazon to stop selling counterfeit products that undermine American manufacturing. Companies can get together and declare unity on an electric future. And we citizens can adjust our behavior.
I sympathize with the contractor who needs a truck to get to work and a place to store his/her tools. Give them a tax credit so they can buy the Ford F-150 electric. But the family of four that pulls into the parking spot next to me in a Cadillac Escalade that takes $100 to fill up? You can’t cry for Ukraine and drive an SUV.
You want to help Ukraine? Ride a bike, walk, or buy an electric vehicle or a Prius. You will drive down prices and stop subsidizing Putin’s war on Ukraine.
*** Thanks to NYU Professor Scott Galloway for the lecture on gas prices.
