Voters are mad as hell about high gas prices and inflation. So, will electing Democrats solve the problem, or make it worse? The last time they held power, Democrats waged war on fossil fuels and unleashed the worst inflation in four decades. Electing them to tackle affordability would be like making a pyromaniac fire marshal.
If Democrats cared about high gas prices, they would support a major push to increase domestic production. But during Joe Biden’s four years as president, Democrats prioritized fighting climate change over reducing gas prices. In 2019, Biden campaigned on a promise to tax and regulate the fossil fuel industry out of existence, declaring, “I guarantee you we’re going to end fossil fuel.” Banks and investment firms responded by pulling back investment in oil and gas. The New York Times reported in the fall of 2021 that the “flow of capital from Wall Street has slowed to a trickle after a decade in which investors poured over $1.4 trillion into North American oil and gas producers through stock and bond issues and loans” as woke capitalists pared “their exposure to fossil fuels to meet the commitments they have made to fight climate change.”
While President Donald Trump opened 100 million acres of public land and water to oil and gas exploration in his first term, Biden approved about 92 percent fewer onshore federal acres for exploration, and withdrew more than 625 million acres of federal waters from future drilling. Trump opened the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to exploration, but Biden canceled all remaining ANWR leases, and canceled the Keystone XL pipeline between the United States and Canada. After being forced by a federal judge to end his moratorium on new leases, Biden and the Democrats raised the royalty rate on those leases and imposed $18 billion in punitive taxes on the oil and gas industry.
Result? When Biden left office in January 2025, there were just 478 U.S. rigs drilling for oil, about half the 2018 peak of 888 during Trump’s first term. The number of rigs has not recovered in Trump’s second term. The price shock of the Iran war will end once the war is over, but the damage done by the Democrats’ war on fossil fuels has been lasting. During Trump’s first term, the United States became an energy superpower, supplanting Russia and Saudi Arabia as the world’s largest oil producer. If voters elect Democrats, they will resume their assault on petroleum production — which will lead to higher, not lower, prices at the pump.
How about inflation? Americans are understandably upset that consumer prices today are 28 percent higher than they were in January 2021 — which means something that cost $100 now costs about $128. Most don’t realize that about $21 of those higher prices were the result of Biden’s inflationary spending policies. That’s because Biden’s first big bill as president was the passage of nearly $1.9 trillion in social spending disguised as pandemic relief — sending millions of Americans stimulus checks, providing the largest child tax credit payments ever and extending ludicrously generous unemployment supplements that paid many Americans more to stay home than to work.
It helped generate inflation unseen since the levels unleashed by President Jimmy Carter. As Obama administration Treasury official Steven Rattner explained, the Democrats’ massive spending was the “original sin” behind a rapid rise in consumer prices, because it “overstimulated this economy” by “putting too much money in people’s pockets, which created a lot of this inflation.” Jason Furman, who chaired Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, said Democrats’ massive spending “poured kerosene on the fire” of inflation.
Well, Democrats want to bring the kerosene back to Washington. Multiple Democratic Senate candidates running in competitive swing states — from Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan to Troy Jackson in Maine, from Peggy Flanagan in Minnesota to Angie Nixon in Florida — support Medicare-for-All, which George Mason University’s Mercatus Center has said would cost the federal government at least $32 trillion over the first 10 years. Democrats are also campaigning on a host of other spending promises — from tuition-free higher education, free child care and student debt cancellation to national paid family leave and the Green New Deal. The miasma of spending they would unleash if they ultimately got full control of the federal government would be unprecedented. And with voters outraged about high gas prices, most of these candidates are downplaying their climate and anti-fossil fuel extremism. But make no mistake: Many share their party’s irrational obsession with the so-called climate crisis and will resume their party’s war on “Big Oil” if elected.
Bottom line: Most of the higher prices Americans are paying today are a hangover from the last time Democrats controlled the levers of power. They have not learned from their mistakes. They still hate fossil fuels and love government spending — which is a sure path to more inflation, not less.
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