President Joe Biden on Tuesday lashed out at critics and deflected blame for soaring inflation and skyrocketing gas prices.
During an address to the AFL-CIO, America’s largest federation of labor unions, a tense Biden pushed back on the claims that his administration is to blame for the country’s economic woes.
The president then directed the blame again on Russian president Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine as the sole reason for record-high gas prices.
“I’ve done everything in my power to blunt Putin’s gas price hike. Just since he invaded Ukraine, it’s gone up $1.74 a gallon, because of nothing else but that,” Biden said.
He also slammed criticism that inflation is high because of reckless government spending, yelling: “I don’t want to hear anymore of these lies about reckless spending! We’re changing people’s lives!”
This comes as the national average price for a gallon of gas hit $5.01 on Monday, another new record.
On Monday, Biden sent a letter to oil companies, threatening to use “emergency authorities” of the federal government to make them boost oil production and lower gas prices.
“At a time of war – historically high refinery profit margins being passed directly onto American families are not acceptable,” the president wrote in the letter. ″[C]ompanies must take immediate actions to increase the supply of gasoline, diesel, and other refined product.”
He added that the administration was ready to use “all reasonable and appropriate Federal Government tools and emergency authorities to increase refinery capacity and output in the near term.”
“Since the beginning of the year, refiners’ margins for refining gasoline and diesel have tripled, and are currently at their highest levels ever recorded,” Biden wrote in the letter, which was sent to oil companies such as Exxon Mobil, Shell, BP, and Chevron.
Most recently, the president claimed that soaring gas prices is transitory toward a greener economy but Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen admitted that Biden’s prediction had been “wrong.”
“I think I was wrong then about the path that inflation would take,” Yellen said. “As I mentioned there have been unanticipated and large shocks to the economy that have boosted energy and food prices and um, supply bottlenecks that have affected our economy badly, that I didn’t, at the time, understand.”
