American wallets are hurting at the gas pump and in general, and Republicans are quick to display an ignorance of how gas prices work as they point the finger at President Joe Biden and his administration.

But Biden’s Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg argued last weekend that those blaming the President should pump the brakes as “the price of gasoline is not set by a dial in the Oval Office.”

via Twitter

According to Buttigieg, the administration is doing all that it can to fight the sky high gas prices and overall inflation, which is now at its highest in decades, Buttigieg told ABC’s “This Week.”

According to AAA, the average price of gasoline across the United States is $4.85 per gallon.

Transportation Sec. Pete Buttigeig via Flickr / Gage Skidmore https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

Earlier this year, President Biden authorized opening the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, the nation’s emergency crude oil reserves, to help ease prices at the pump, and Buttigieg stated “I don’t think it’s correct to say it hasn’t made any difference at all, adding that the administration is trying to strengthen the supply chain and “invest in the capacity, both physical and human, of our economy to keep up with demand.”

Buttigieg concluded:

“The president has made clear inflation is his top economic priority, and he’s laid out a very clear strategy for doing that.”

 

President Joe Biden via Flickr / GPA Photo Archive https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/

The economic struggles across the country have certainly hurt the President’s approval ratings and created new challenges for Democrats fighting for congressional seats in the upcoming mid term elections, as a poll released last week by ABC News/Ipsos indicated that three out of five Americans disapprove of the president’s handling of the economy, according to results of an ABC News/Ipsos poll released Sunday.

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Christopher Powell