The United States could by some measure drive down inflation by producing its own energy, former Trump economist Stephen Moore said Sunday.
Speaking to “The Cats Roundtable” radio show on WABC 770 AM hosted by John Catsimatidis, Moore said “energy … is the master resource. Everything that we have is derivative of energy. So when energy costs go up, the costs of” food, housing, and everything goes up. “So, in other words, we’re not going to solve the inflation problem until we bring energy costs down.”
The Biden administration is importing record-oil from Russia and Saudia Arabia, a 17% increase since 2020.
According to Consumer Price Index (CPI) data released in mid-December, “the energy index rose 33.3 percent over the past 12 months with all major energy component indexes increasing sharply. The gasoline index rose 58.1 percent over the last year, its largest 12-month increase since the period ending April 1980.” Additionally, as Moore points out, and as CNBC reports, “inflation [in 2021] accelerated at its fastest pace since 1982.”
During Catsimatidis’ interview with Moore, it was noted that part of the reason for increased energy costs is an effort by Democrats to sway people into buying electric cars.
Speaking to CNBC’s “Squawk Box” in Aug. on President Joe Biden’s executive order to make electric vehicles half of all new auto sales by 2030, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said the U.S. has “got to act, the transportation sector is the biggest part of our economy emitting greenhouse gases, and cars and trucks are one of the biggest parts of that.”
But as Moore points out, “only 2% or 3% of the cars in the United States are electric … We are going to use gasoline, at the very least, for another three or four decades. The idea that we are somehow going to transition overnight to electric cars is crazy.”
“We have more energy than anybody else, and yet we are importing it,” Moore adds.
“In Donald Trump’s last month in office we were not importing oil from the rest of the world. We were producing more oil than we were consuming. Now we are in a situation where we are 2 million barrels of oil [a day] down in production because of Biden’s policies. And that means we have to import it from other countries. That’s about a $50-billion-a-year tax [or more] on the American economy.”