Obama in Your Tank

“Obama Defends Energy Policies” is the headline over a Reuters dispatch in respect of gasoline prices. It reports on the president’s launch of what the British wire service characterizes as “the most comprehensive defense to date of his energy policies.” It says the president is “pushing back against election-year attacks from Republicans” who say his energy policies “are to blame for high gas prices that are eroding his popularity with voters.” The problem with all this is that it’s not the energy policies that are driving up gasoline prices. It’s the monetary policies, and if the Republicans can’t manage to get that point into focus, it’s hard to see how they can put the rest of the monetary debate to their advantage.

We’ve been making this point for months now. The fact is that priced in specie — gold or silver — the value of gasoline has been plunging. We made this point in April last year, after Mr. Obama used his weekly radio address to declare that to rectify rising gasoline prices there was, as he put it, “no silver bullet.” Our point was that a gallon of gasoline was selling at the time for fewer grains of silver than it was selling for when Mr. Obama (or, for that matter, Mr. Bush) had acceded to the presidency. Gasoline at the pump was selling for a sixth of an ounce of silver when Mr. Obama was sworn in. Today, the value of the same gallon of gasoline has fallen to less than a 10th of an ounce of silver. Measured in gold, the value of gasoline has also been plunging.

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