2024 Fact Check 4: Diesel prices were stable under Trump, but skyrocketed under Biden

This fact should be common knowledge, 27 days away from the election, but it isn't. Why?

Oct 09, 2024

Preface: See 2024 Fact Check: Introduction and link-list

Source

U.S. Energy Information Administration data; click link and hover over timeline to verify the data in the above infographic is accurate:

Analysis

Vice President Harris keeps claiming that consumer prices have spiked because of corporate greed (“price gouging”). And as has become practice, the mainstream news media basically parrots her claims, without pointing out what should be taught in elementary school about about basic economics, but sadly is not, that enable a functional 12-year-old to obliterate her assertions:

Let’s say Company A sells a particular kind of bluetooth speaker. Company A’s management decides to arbitrarily jack up the price of these speakers, beyond what consumers can pay for similar speakers, via Companies B-Z. What happens, in a market system?

Companies B-Z see what Company A has done, and directs advertising to its customers, to draw them away. Company A will then watch its customers flee to its competitors, because it acted in an irrational manner.

That’s how a market system works.

And that’s how an informed population, that lives under a market system, understands it. They also understand that if the costs paid by all sellers of speakers go up, they will uniformly have to raise their prices.

US consumer prices were generally stable from 2017-2021, in large part because no major new costs of doing business were imposed by the federal government, meaning:

No major new policies were implemented by the Trump-Pence administration, or the agencies that were under its control, that would negatively affect energy costs
No new Congressional legislation that Trump either signed into law, or went into effect because he was unsuccessful at vetoing it

In contrast, the price of diesel fuel skyrocketed under Biden-Harris, due in large part to its policies, which — along with other factors — caused a “trickle-up” in prices across the board, of everything that relies on diesel engines to transport raw or finished materials to market.

Yet have you ever seen a “journalist” ask Harris, Walz or their cheerleaders about this, least of all with an infographic as simple as this one, that shows the contrast in diesel fuel prices under the Trump-Pence administration, vs Biden-Harris’s?

Why is there no comparable infographic — or any kind of fact-check — on the front pages of either the GOP’s or the Trump campaign websites? (See September 30, 2024 archive captures of their websites are here and here.)

These are some of the reasons why the false “price gouging” narrative has such resilience, in obscuring any discussion of the actual reasons why consumer prices have spiked under the Biden-Harris administration.

So who is the Harris-Walz-DNC machinery’s target audience for the “price gouging” falsehood?

Based on my observations, here’s a general approximation:

If you doubt me, take a look at some of the survey data I’ve compiled over the last 20 years to indicate what Harris’s and Walz’s allies in America’s “educational” system have done to our children, particularly regarding their civic, economic and taxation literacy:

"America At The Precipice" - A special report by Jon Sutz

Excerpts:

[1.11] 57% of U.S. high schoolers score below proficiency regarding knowledge of basic economic principles; less than half can correctly define the term “budget deficit”; nearly half cannot identify what the stock market does, or its relationship to our economy.
[1.12] Almost half of U.S. teens and adults believe the statement, “Money holds its value well in times of inflation,” is correct.
[1.13] 83% of U.S. college graduates and 68% of elected officials cannot identify the functional differences between the free market and a command economy.
[1.14] 60% of U.S. high school students, and 36% of adults, do not know that if a city government sets a maximum amount landlords can charge in rent, the most likely result is fewer apartments available than people want to rent.
64% of Americans are unaware that the U.S. spends more on Medicare, education, and food stamps than on national defense. The least-informed group: only 17% of Democrats got this right.

All of which helps explain why “The View,” a veritable hothouse of leftist propaganda, is the #1 most-viewed daytime TV talk show for years. — and why Harris chose this forum to be “interviewed” on, as opposed to an actual news organization, on October 8:

This is not how the American constitutional republic is supposed to operate.

The largest single factor in how far away from that ideal is a mainstream “news” media that professes to deliver accurate, contextual information to the American people, and to act as their watchdogs regarding the corridors of power, yet which just accepts these lies and misdirection about basic economic principles, because it is so wedded to advancing one political party’s electoral fortunes.

How wedded? Consider: of American journalists who make monetary donations to political campaigns, 96% of this cash goes to Democrats. (And in a completely unrelated coincidence, 98% of teacher’s union political donations go to Democrats.) All of which we are supposed to believe has no impact on the quality of the news we receive, and that of the citizenship training that is given to rising generations of American voters, in the schools ae are forced to subsidize with our tax dollars.

Update, October 10: Elon Musk shares iconic video by economist Milton Friedman re inflation

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