Biden advisers ignore basic economics, claim increasing US oil supply would have no impact on price
A common political theme on the right is that American Democrats, leftists, and liberals do not understand basic economics. The stereotype, conservatives will say, despite protestations from the left, exists for a reason.
Imagine conservatives' combined frustration and sense of vindication when President Joe Biden's advisers showed up on cable news Wednesday morning to declare that increasing the United States' domestic oil production would have zero impact on the price of oil.
That's right, as the U.S. continues to see record highs at the gas pump and surging oil prices, it appears that Deputy National Security Adviser Daleep Singh believes oil prices are not connected to supply — even though Monday's announcement of a U.S. and U.K. ban on imports of Russian oil had an immediate effect on oil prices, which even President Biden acknowledged in his statement making the ban on Moscow's oil official.
When pressed by MSNBC's "Morning Joe" cohost Willie Geist on the Keystone XL pipeline, which Biden stopped, and ongoing bipartisan calls for increased domestic production, Singh called the Keystone situation a "distraction" and then added, "Even if we drilled as much as we could, the price of oil is still set globally by the demand and supply conditions, and much of that supply is controlled by tyrants like [Russian President Vladimir] Putin."
Singh cited "supply and demand" and then showed he has little grasp on what the term means. Additional U.S. oil supply would have an impact on prices — this is known.
And Singh wasn't alone pushing that line in the media today.
White House Director of the National Economic Council Brian Deese went on CNBC to continue the lie.
Deese declared, "There is no amount of domestic production that we can do when we're dealing with volatile global commodity, where the price is set globally, there's no amount of domestic production we can do to reduce or eliminate our vulnerability as a country to that volatility."
Biden, himself, has acknowledged that increasing supply would lower prices — not just in his admission Monday that, because of the ban on Russian oil, gas prices are "going to go up further" but also in his recent (unsuccessful) attempts to woo the House of Saud and Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro to up their countries' oil output.
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