Another Biden phony family fable
President Biden is fond of telling fictitious family stories. His maternal grandfather was an All-American football player at Santa Clara University in California — this at a time when All-Americans only came from Army, the Ivy League, or the Big 10, and Santa Clara had no All-American players at all until the 1960s. He used to take his children, then grandchildren, individually, when they came of age, to Europe to tour Nazi death camps. When a teenager, on Sundays, he moseyed on over to the local Black Baptist church in Wilmington, Delaware to assist and even guide those unprivileged parishioners in their Civil Rights activities — though nobody from the church recalls ever seeing such a boy at the time, and no one recalls seeing him until he became a candidate for public office in the 1960s.
In recent months, Biden has grown fond of telling another family story of sitting down at the family dinner table and talking about, and worrying over, the price of gasoline every time the price of gasoline went up.
However, Biden was born in 1942 and came of age in the 1950s — a time of the most stable gasoline prices in American history. Biden is lying — again.
He did it again on April 6 in a speech given to the North American Building Trades Union. The following remark is verbatim.
16:54 — ... As my dad would say e-every time that price of the gas went up with the pump, guess what? It was a conversation [at] our kitchen table ...
This chart is from the Office of Energy & Renewable Energy and tracks the average price of gasoline from 1929 to 2015.
I reproduce here the portion of their chart dealing with the years 1949–1965, the period of Biden's childhood in Delaware and early adulthood. Column 2 was the actual current price per gallon. Column 3 is the retail price of gasoline in 2015 constant dollars — in other words, after adjustment for inflation.
1949 |
0.27 |
2.17 |
1950 |
0.27 |
2.14 |
1951 |
0.27 |
2.03 |
1952 |
0.27 |
2.01 |
1953 |
0.29 |
2.08 |
1954 |
0.29 |
2.08 |
1955 |
0.29 |
2.05 |
1956 |
0.30 |
2.04 |
1957 |
0.31 |
2.05 |
1958 |
0.30 |
1.96 |
1959 |
0.31 |
1.94 |
1960 |
0.31 |
1.95 |
1961 |
0.31 |
1.91 |
1962 |
0.31 |
1.88 |
1963 |
0.30 |
1.84 |
1964 |
0.30 |
1.82 |
1965 |
0.31 |
1.83 |
Summary: The price of gasoline remained constant from 1949 to 1952. It went up by two cents in 1953 and stayed there through 1955. Thereafter, it fluctuated from 30 to 31 cents per gallon all through 1965.
And after adjustment for inflation, the cost of gasoline actually dropped from 1949 to 1965 by 16%.
I also reproduce here a chart for 1929 to 2011 from the Department of Energy. It shows both actual costs and inflation-adjusted costs for the entire period. As one can see, the actual costs remained almost flat during Biden's entire childhood, and actually declined after adjustment for inflation.
Conclusion: Biden is lying through his teeth again about yet another fake, nonexistent family memory.