‘Ouch’: Bezos slams Biden for tweet demanding petrol stations lower prices
Jeff Bezos has ripped into Joe Biden over a tweet about soaring petrol prices, saying the US President showed a “deep misunderstanding” of basic economics.
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Jeff Bezos has ripped into US President Joe Biden over a social media post demanding petrol stations lower their prices, saying the leader showed a “deep misunderstanding” of basic economics.
The billionaire Amazon founder was among many to deliver a brutal assessment of Mr Biden’s tweet, which attracted widespread criticism over the weekend as soaring consumer prices continue to cause major political damage to the administration.
In the US, the average price of petrol is now sitting at around $US5 per gallon, equivalent to just under $2 per litre in Australia.
Ouch. Inflation is far too important a problem for the White House to keep making statements like this. It’s either straight ahead misdirection or a deep misunderstanding of basic market dynamics. https://t.co/XgKfEICZpk
— Jeff Bezos (@JeffBezos) July 3, 2022
“My message to the companies running gas stations and setting prices at the pump is simple: This is a time of war and global peril,” Mr Biden’s Twitter account posted on Saturday.
“Bring down the price you are charging at the pump to reflect the cost you’re paying for the product. And do it now.”
Mr Bezos wrote in response: “Ouch. Inflation is far too important a problem for the White House to keep making statements like this. It’s either straight ahead misdirection or a deep misunderstanding of basic market dynamics.”
The President made a similar appeal to petrol stations in a speech last month calling on Congress to pass a three-month “gas tax holiday”, telling operators to “bring down the price you are charging at the pump to reflect the cost you are paying for the product”.
“I’ve heard plenty of explanations from companies and economists about why it normally takes time for these price reductions to reach the consumer,” Mr Biden said at the time.
“When the price of a barrel of oil goes up, it doesn’t make take much time for the price at the pump to go up.”
In the US, petrol stations typically make no more than 2 to 5 cents per gallon they sell once costs are factored in.
California gubernatorial candidate Michael Shellenberger, author of Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All, said Mr Biden had “repeatedly lied about the causes of the energy crisis and divided the country”.
“Many people are confused as to why high oil and gasoline prices aren’t resulting in significantly more oil production and refining,” he wrote.
“But the reason is simple: President Biden has actively prevented it since taking office in the name of climate change.”
Responding to some of the criticism on Twitter, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre argued petrol prices had not fallen along with a recent dip in oil prices.
“Oil prices have dropped by about $US15 ($A22) over the past month, but prices at the pump have barely come down,” Ms Jean-Pierre said on Twitter on Sunday. “That’s not ‘basic market dynamics’. It’s a market that is failing the American consumer.”
Appearing on Fox New Sunday, Pentagon spokesman John Kirby also defended Mr Biden’s comments.
“I think anybody that knows President Biden knows he’s plain-spoken and he tells exactly what he’s thinking in terms that everybody can understand,” Mr Kirby said.
“The American people are facing pain at the pump, clearly now, we are at $US5 a gallon. The President is working very, very hard across many fronts … to try to bring that price down.”
Mr Kirby cited the President’s recent efforts at the G7 summit and the release of oil from America’s strategic oil reserve.
“If everybody co-operates on this, we can bring the price down at least by about a dollar a gallon, so he’s working very, very hard to do this because he knows the impact that high gas prices have on the American household,” he said.
Macron delivers bad news at G7
At the G7 summit in Germany last month, French President Emmanuel Macron was caught on camera breaking bad news to Mr Biden about attempts to get Arab nations to produce more oil.
“I had a call with MBZ,” Mr Macron told Mr Biden, referring to the leader of the United Arab Emirates, Sheik Mohamed bin Zayed al-Nahyan.
“He told me two things. One, I’m at a maximum, maximum (production capacity) – what he claims … Second, according to MBZ, the Saudis can increase a little bit, by 150 (thousand barrels per day) or a little bit more, but they don’t have huge capacities at least before six months’ time.”
That news means Mr Biden’s visit to Saudi Arabia this month may fail to woo the oil-rich Arab states to help alleviate the spike in petrol prices.
“Implicit in Macron’s remarks was that the US needs to produce far more than Biden has been willing to allow,” Mr Shellenberger wrote in an opinion piece.
“The problem is that Biden is in the grip of a pro-scarcity ideology that demands humankind return to relying 100 per cent on renewables, like we did before the Industrial Revolution. But that’s a delusion.”
Mr Shellenberger argued solar panels and electric cars relied on lithium battery power, which had “indeed become cheaper in recent years, but that’s mostly because China uses coerced Uighur Muslim labour to produce those batteries”.
“If those technologies were made in the US by workers paid a living wage, they would never be affordable,” he wrote.
— with NY Post
Originally published as ‘Ouch’: Bezos slams Biden for tweet demanding petrol stations lower prices
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