The Biden administration has continually passed off the rapidly rising gas prices as “Putin’s price hike.” This description ignores the fact that gasoline prices began rising steadily right after President Biden took office. On Friday, The Daily Caller posted an article about the real cause of the rising gasoline prices.

The article reports:

The White House often describes higher prices at the pump as “Putin’s price hike,” but prices were going up steadily after President Joe Biden took office. The price already increased by 55%, rising from a U.S. average of $2.11 when Biden took office to $3.51 the day before Russian President Vladimir Putin decided to invade Ukraine, according to Forbes.

“The ‘Putin’s price hike’ is laughable – and you can tell because no matter how hard they try to advance this particular little bit of propaganda absolutely nobody but White House spokespeople use the word,” John Cochrane, a Hoover Institution senior fellow, told the Caller.

“The administration wants to blame anybody but itself for the challenges of the American economy. [‘Putin’s price hike’ is] a good talking point because there’s a sliver of truth in it,” President of the American Institute for Economic Research, William Ruger, told the Caller in an interview.

The current U.S. average price of gas sits at $4.59 per gallon and prices in California have reached as high as $7.25 per gallon.

The article notes that although inflation is part of the problem, the problem is also due to the Biden administration’s war on oil and gas.

The article notes:

“At least early on in the price run-up, drilling activity was comparatively muted. Cancelled leases, cancelled pipelines, proposed regulations to penalize lenders that financed fossil-energy businesses all dampened production responses that would be putting oil and gas on the market today,” Kreutzer said.

…Biden stymied future production of gasoline by canceling the Keystone XL oil pipeline, halting the sales of a drilling area in Alaska and two in the Gulf of Mexico, and banning new oil and gas leasing on public lands.

“If the global supply of oil is low, we should ask who canceled the Keystone Pipeline on his first day in office, why fracking is banned in many states, and so forth. Hobbling U.S. energy investment has been the deliberate policy of the administration from the first day in office,” Cochrane said.

“The administration should have accelerated approval of pipeline permits, instead of blocking and cancelling them. It should not have cancelled leases that had already been issued. It should not be using regulatory agencies like the Security and Exchange Commission and appointments at the Federal Reserve to hobble investment in oil and gas production,” Kreutzer (Institute for Energy Research senior economist David Kreutzer) said.

Elections matter, and energy policies matter.