How bad were gas prices under Biden in 2022? For the first time since 2011, the IRS has issued a ruling that there will be not one but two mileage deduction rates for your 2022 tax returns. From January to June, the deduction is 58.5 cents a mile. From July to December, you can deduct 62.5 cents per mile for business-related trips. And for 2023, the rate will go up to 65.5 cents. The deduction applies to gas and electric vehicles and represents three mileage-related increases in 13 months. The Biden administration’s war on oil is taking its toll.
Oil stockpiling by the federal government became an essential strategy during the Arab oil embargo of the 1970s. The Strategic Petroleum Reserve was created in 1975. In 2022, Democrat President Joe Biden decided that the reserve was really an in-kind donation to the Democrat Party. Oil was strategically used not as part of our national defense but as an incumbent protection plan. It was deployed as part of a political defense strategy to protect Democrat candidates from angry voters, incensed over inflation-fueled gas prices.
According to Gas Buddy’s latest report, the party is over, and now the devil wants his due. At $3.49 per gallon, prices are up 33.3 cents a gallon over last month. House Republicans are responding with HR-21 — the Strategic Production Response Act. This would tie all releases from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to new drilling permits. These are not the leases Biden talks about. This Democrat talking point is a rhetorical sleight of hand since having a lease you can’t drill on is worthless for increasing oil production. And new production is what is badly needed.
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Since Biden took office, oil output has dropped about a million barrels a day. Drilling would help the country far more than releasing stockpiled federal oil into the marketplace for political effect. But drilling would run afoul of the Biden administration’s strategy of ending the role of fossil fuels in the US economy. As the IRS ruling shows, the shortage this policy has created is driving up the cost of doing business and jacking up consumer prices to unprecedented levels. It is even prompting the IRS to give a back-door tax break to businesses.
Is it now time to eliminate the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and deploy market forces instead to solve the problem? If the Strategic Petroleum Reserve exists to facilitate political price fixing, it has outlived its usefulness, no matter how noble a concept it is. And unless Republicans can find a way to restrict the oil reserve’s use for the emergency purposes the legislation was intended for, a tall order, it might be time to end it. You can’t give politicians nice things and not expect them not to ruin them. It might be a good wake-up call if the federal government had to live with the oil market its misguided policies have created. When even the IRS notices how energy policy is hurting the economy, maybe the politicians should wake up and do something about it.
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