Gas Bag

​Yesterday, I saw the tweet posted --

Now, I didn’t have details at my fingertips, but I was pretty sure about two things.  The first is that I live in California.  And the second is that the gas station two blocks from me is selling gasoline nowhere near $10 a gallon.

So, I sort of scratched my head.  And thought, hmm, that's strange.  But maybe that's real, or maybe it isn't, maybe it's from another state, maybe it is from California, maybe it's from several weeks ago before President Biden opened out resources to help bring down the price, maybe it's a station in the middle of the Mojave Desert where there's not another station for 10 miles and prices are always significantly higher, maybe it's just one, normal station in a highly-populated area doing price gouging, maybe...Well, there are lots of maybes. So, I thought I'd do something that the fellow here chose not to do.  I looked it up.

I’ll admit that it took a while to come up with information and not everyone has that kind of time.  I typed in “gas prices California” and started twiddling my thumbs and waited about four seconds – which is now the definition of “a while” – one of the top links on the results page was from an obscure organization called the Automobile Club of America. 

And the AAA page showed that the average price of gasoline in the state of California is -- $5.748.  And it's dated...today.

In the immortal words of Stephen Moore -- Don't believe me? See for yourself:

You can even check out the page yourself here to see that it's real.

Now, pulling out my pocket calculator, it turns out that $5.748 is a lot less than $10.  In fact, it’s barely over half the price.  What a bargain!

But here’s the thing. 

Even that $5.748 is misleading.  Because that’s just the average price that stations are selling gas through California.  But if you look at the color coding of the map, you can see that the price of gas in Los Angeles is actually around the national average of $4.098.  And the prices of gas south of there in San Diego is close to that.  And there are a whole mass of people in this area of Southern California.  How many?  Over 21 million people!  In a state of 39 million, that’s over half the population. 

Which means that over half the state in just this one area (you can see other deep red or light red areas, like in San Francisco), the average price of gas is actually closer to $4.098 – which is well under half the pesky $10 “nosebleed” price Mr. Moore was trying to pawn off on the public.  Just over 40%, in fact.

It’s one of the many things are really bug me about social media.  And a lot of the public discourse coming from Republicans these days, taking the lead from Trump and his 31,000 documented lies and figuring, what the heck, they can lie, too.  I don’t mind discussing issues with people – but when you’re going to throw around fact, get them right.  At least get them close.  At least try to get them close.

But here’s the thing.

When I saw that tweet above from Stephen Moore, I just figured it was yet another of though Trump Republican acolytes pulling numbers out of one of his orifices and didn’t know better and didn’t care.  And so I then went to do my quick research to come up with reality to let him know and make the point how wrong-headed it is to be so inaccurate without really trying.

But before that, I finally checked out his Twitter bio.  It reads --

“Trumponomics author. @FreedomWorks Senior Economic Contributor. @WSJ Writer.  @club4growth Founder. Strategic partner @32Advisors. Former @Heritage economist.”

This wasn’t your ordinary, garden variety Twitter schlub.  This was an economics writer.  Someone who had written a book defending Trump economics that increased the national debt $7.8 trillion, a rise of 35%!!  Someone who is a senior economics contributor to one of the major far-right Tea Party organizations.    Someone who writes for the Wall Street Journal.  Someone who used to be an economist for the far-right Heritage Foundation think tank.

And he posted a gut-wrenchingly disingenuous graphic that supposed showed the prices of gas in California was almost at the “nosebleed” level of $10 – when it was actually (for most people in the state) closer to $4.10.

If it’s annoying for those on the far-right to keep seeing their party described as fascist, imagine how annoying it is to have to describe the Republican Party as fascist.  Now, to be clear, I’m not saying that Stephen Moore is a fascist.  I don’t know his work well enough.  (Though I did track down a research study he and others just published this week on the economy, education and health during the pandemic, about which he tweeted that “Florida was right, California was wrong.”)  What I’m saying is that a tactic of fascism is to attack the authority of other centers of power, create uncertainty about facts, raise so much doubt in the minds of the public so that they can’t trust what’s true – and so then you rise up and cry out “I am the only person you can trust!  Listen to me.  I will lead you to the truth.  Because only I know it.”  And so, Mr. Moore has conveniently let the GOP fascism color the way his work is presented and be as disingenuous as possible, screw the facts, who cares what’s true?

Which is the definition of running on empty.