LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA - JUNE 10: U.S. President Joe Biden delivers remarks aboard the Battleship ... [+] USS Iowa Museum at the Port of Los Angeles on June 10, 2022 in Los Angeles, California. Biden is in the Los Angeles area while taking part in the IX Summit of the Americas. Leaders from North, Central, and South America traveled to Los Angeles for the summit to discuss issues such as trade and migration. The United States is hosting the summit for the first time since 1994 when it took place in Miami. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)
Early during his first year in office, President Joe Biden claimed inflation that started rising after $5 trillion in federal pandemic relief spending was “transitory.” That refrain continued for months, until it became obvious it wasn’t transitory at all. Last December Powell finally admitted that “it’s probably a good time to retire that word (transitory).” Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen herself admitted she had misjudged the situation during recent congressional testimony.
As that canard was starting to lose its cache, Biden and his team resorted to blasting the oil industry for rising gas prices, with one White House official telling Reuters “...we are using every tool at our disposal to address anti-competitive practices in U.S. and global energy markets to ensure reliable and stable energy markets.” No one in the administration bothered to explain what “anti-competitive practices” were being employed by an industry that during the height of pandemic lockdowns saw the market price of their primary commodity fall below zero.
That bit of blame-shifting went on until March, when White House spokesperson Jen Psaki rolled out the “Putin’s Price Hike” talking point after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and a new blame-shifting narrative was born. President Putin became the ideal boogeyman for an inflation problem Biden himself had claimed to have been fighting since at least the summer of 2021. The President on Friday during a press event at the Port of Los Angeles, said, “We’ve never seen anything like Putin’s tax on food and gas.”
But few buy it anymore. So Biden has zeroed in on a new boogeyman — the “big corporations” who he claims “don’t pay their fair share” of taxes. On Friday he singled out ExxonMobil XOM :
Naturally curious what folks at ExxonMobil might think about being singled out for this sort of ad hominem attack on the company’s integrity by a sitting President of the United States, I reached out for comment and received the following response from spokesman Todd Spitler:
The president of the United States is simply lying to us. The reality is that Exxon and other oil companies are drilling and investing, on a massive scale, both in the United States and worldwide. They pay many billions in local, state and federal taxes. And if the government doesn’t think it’s enough, then Congress can change those laws.
Joe Biden was first elected to the U.S. Senate half a century ago, in 1972, a year before the first Arab Oil Embargo. In the long years since, American politicians have found no handier boogeymen to blame for rising inflation than “Big Oil” in general, and ExxonMobil specifically. Why expect old dogs to learn new tricks?