Biden’s gas gaffe proves he’s out of touch with everyday Americans

Sign up for the View from Westminster email for expert analysis straight to your inbox

Get our free View from Westminster email

SIGN UP

I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice

Over the weekend, I drove from East Tennessee to Chicago and watched gas prices rise by more than a dollar.

Down home, gas is currently $4.17 a gallon. Here in the city, where I’m visiting friends for the week, the average price for a tank of gas is $5.40 a gallon – though driving through Logan Square on the north side I saw it at $5.55 a gallon.

In some parts of the country, it is even worse. Los Angeles has seen gas prices reach an eyewatering $7.83 a gallon, which is higher than the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour. Considering the average car holds about 12 gallons of gas, that means it is possible to work an entire day and still not be able to fill up your tank.

To you, to me, and to the average American struggling to make ends meet, this is an economic emergency. To the president of the United States, though, it is an “incredible transition”. Joe Biden is taking a lot of heat for comments he made at a press conference with the Japanese Prime Minister, saying that “when it comes to the gas prices, we’re going through an incredible transition that is taking place that, God willing, when it’s over, we’ll be stronger, and the world will be stronger and less reliant on fossil fuels when this is over.”

To paraphrase no less an intellect than Tyrion Lannister, our dependence on fossil fuels is indeed a problem. The more immediate problem is that we’re… well, you can finish the quote. The national average for a gallon of gas is higher than it has ever been, even at the height of the Great Recession in 2008. This is negatively affecting the pocketbooks of workaday Americans, who are spending as much as $5,000 a year on gas. The median weekly income of full-time American workers is $989, which multiplied by 52 weeks that is $51,428 a year.

That means Americans could be spending nearly 10 per cent of their annual income on gas alone. In rural America, where I live and where families live greater distances from amenities such as grocery stores and hospitals, geography necessitates we travel farther than city dwellers. Yet, we also make less than our urban counterparts.

In big cities, too, these prices are extortionate. Here in Chicago, the Census Bureau reports that the average commute time is 34.7 minutes, while the median income is only $62,097. That number, of course, is skewed by the more affluent residents of places like Lincoln Park and Lakeview. The median income of Englewood, on the city’s South Side, is only $22,127.

Even with Chicago’s fantastic (by American standards) public transit – which, from experience I can tell you is not the most convenient way to get around the city, thanks to the layout of the train system – a car remains the best way to get around a city that stretches 25 miles north to south and 15 miles east to west. Never mind the fact that crime on Chicago public transit has increased over the past year. Just this weekend a mass shooting near a CTA stop killed two people and injured seven others.

Meanwhile, the president seemingly thinks this is nothing more than growing pains that our economy must endure in order to break our addiction to fossil fuels. Certainly, climate change is something we should all be concerned about. Ending our dependence on oil – foreign or domestic – is an admirable mid- to long-term goal. It is not, however, going to happen overnight. Nor is it going to happen before the November elections, when the voters who can still afford to drive to the polls cast their ballots.

Those voters could be forgiven for thinking that this is Biden’s Marie Antoinette moment. His words ring as hollow as “let them eat cake” would have rang to the French peasantry had the apocryphal quote been real. Unfortunately for Biden, his quote is real – and will be repeated ad nauseum on Fox News, and probably CNN too. (No doubt Jen Psaki will run interference for him on MSNBC.)

It does not bring me, a lifelong Democrat, joy to say that the Democratic President of the United States is out of touch with the American people. That is, however, the only conclusion I can draw from his callous – and yes, I do believe that is a fair description – remarks. It’s like Biden can’t fathom the real pain and struggle Americans from the hills of Tennessee to the shores of the Great Lakes to the sunny streets of Los Angeles are feeling.

It’s as though Biden has forgotten the basics of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. It is hard to care about the possible end of the world from climate change when you’re starving because you couldn’t afford the gas to get to work and they fired you. The only people who think that enduring this kind of economic anguish is worth it is bourgeois environmental activists with tunnel vision. Biden might be afraid to upset them, but he shouldn’t be. What are they going to do? Vote Republican? Hardly.

The president needs to get with the times while he can still afford the trip. Democrats must act – now, not next week, not nearer the election, but now – to help alleviate this onerous burden on the finances of hardworking Americans. Congress must immediately and indefinitely suspend the federal 18.3 cent gas tax. States should follow suit. We must also tap our strategic reserve to alleviate the costs on working families already struggling with the repercussions of COVID and record inflation.

None of this is ideal. I freely admit that. I never thought in a million years that I would be writing a column so critical of this president or for that matter calling for a suspension of a tax I think is on the whole sound public policy. In any other time, I wouldn’t. But we do not live in any other time. We live in the here and now – and in this moment, Americans are crying out for relief and our vehicles do not run on tears.

The gains of acting now to bring the price of gas down and pump more of it into the market outweigh the costs for not only Democrats, but more importantly for the American people. It is for them that inaction will cost more than they can afford. It will also cost the Democrats the November election. And honestly, if they don’t act now to bring down the price of gas, they will have deserved it.