The war in Iran has caused gas prices at the pump to go up, but adjusted for inflation, where are they?

On Tuesday, Issues & Insights posted an article to answer that question.

The article reports:

Democrats were quick to make hay of President Donald Trump’s remark that the high price of gasoline “is peanuts.”

But what if he’s right? What if today’s prices are lower than they were, say, when we had a peanut farmer as president? Or many times since then?

Democrats called Trump “out of touch” with everyday Americans.

“’Peanuts’ isn’t how my constituents would describe the spiking gas prices that make everyday life more expensive,” said New Hampshire Sen. Jeanne Shaheen. “POTUS isn’t paying for this war. Middle-class Americans are, and he couldn’t care less.”

Trump is, of course, being maligned … again. What he said was that the cost of gasoline “is peanuts” next to what would happen if Iran got a nuclear weapon.

He’s certainly right about that.

The article includes the following graph:

The article notes:

Yes, the national average is around $4.60 a gallon. And yes, that means filling up a tank will cost you more than $50.

But every story about high gas prices leaves out one piece of critically important context. Inflation.

When you factor in inflation, you see that today’s prices aren’t nearly as high as they have been over the past several decades. In fact, the national average price hit $5.79 a gallon — in today’s dollars — under Joe Biden in June 2022. (Funny, but we don’t seem to recall gasoline price horror stories being written back then.)

Go a little further back, and you see that gas prices were higher than they are today practically the entire two terms of Barack “We Can’t Drill Our Way To Lower Gas Prices” Obama. In fact, the average inflation-adjusted price of gasoline during Obama’s eight years in office was $4.39.

Most of us have realized that when the war in Iran ends, gas prices will come back down, and the Democrats will have to find something else to complain about.