The Biden administration was just caught in a lie by a Breitbart fact-checker.
A recent statement about gas prices by White House press secretary Jen Psaki was rated by the news site as “mostly false.”
Prices are up
With Memorial Day weekend approaching, Psaki released a statement about gas prices on Friday.
“[A]s Americans are hitting the road, they are paying less in real terms for gas than they have on average over the last 15 years,” Psaki wrote, adding, “and they’re paying about the same as they did in May 2018 and May 2019,” which, of course, was under former President Donald Trump.
As Breitbart noted, this claim is “mostly false.”
“A look at average price data shows gas prices since 2006 (15 years ago) averaged 2.813. The cost of gas is up 7.3% from the average,” Breitbart explained.
The outlet also noted that gas is “still four or five cents above what the cost of gas was during the Trump era,” at $2.962 for 2018 and $2.822 for 2019, as oppose to Biden’s $3.044.
Explaining away reality
If Psaki was right — that gas prices aren’t going up under Biden — then it would seem unnecessary to tack on an additional three paragraphs to her statement attempting to explain away the cost of gas. But that is exactly what she did.
“The Administration’s success in beating the pandemic and getting our economy back on track has led to increased demand for gas as the country re-opens,” she said. “But, while prices have increased from the lows last year — as demand drastically dipped — prices at just about $3 per gallon are still well in-line with what they’ve been in recent decades.”
Psaki went on to claim that gas prices are stabilizing now that the Biden administration got the Colonial Pipeline situation under control. She credited this to the “administration’s aggressive, whole-of-government response to the unprecedented shutdown of that pipeline.”
Finally, the press secretary said that “oil prices are shaped by global forces,” and concluded by claiming that Biden has put “especially the middle-class families … at the center of his economic agenda” by opposing “any proposal to raise the gas tax.”
For a president who worked to undercut America’s energy independence as soon as he entered office, that’s all one heck of a PR spin by Psaki.
The post Psaki caught in lie, White House tries to spin rising gas prices first appeared on Conservative Institute.
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