Never mind that the oil companies are raking in the dough while American families suffer with sky-high gasoline prices. On Fox News, it’s really Biden’s fault!
Yesterday, investment adviser David Bahnsen joined Fox News host Neil Cavuto in defending big oil, and their record profits, while attacking President Joe Biden for calling on them to raise production and lower profits. While he was at it, Bahnsen blamed Biden for the high prices, without pushback from Cavuto.
Cavuto opened the discussion by describing Bahnsen as “tired of this attack line against corporations and businesses in general.”
Bahnsen sounded like an Exxon spokesperson. Saying that Exxon lost $22 billion in 2020, Bahnsen sneered, “Was President Biden campaigning on a message of trying to help big oil that had lost so much money? Exxon this year is gonna make good profits, they’re going to make less than half of Google, they’re going to make less than a third of Apple. So, if that’s a windfall, what’s he wanting to do to big tech?” As if Americans need big tech to get to work or to the grocery store.
“Exxon’s going to spend $25 billion this year on capital expenditures, and they’re going to do the same for the next five years each to grow jobs, to ramp up production," Bahnsen continued. "This entire line of attack from the White House is economically and ideologically irrational."
Cavuto did his part. He acknowledged that oil companies are “big” but, “as a percentage of revenue and all that, they’re kind of in the middling of major corporate sectors as far as the money they make off of all that.”
“There does seem to be a concerted effort here to blame them for gunning a bad situation,” Cavuto added.
That’s when Bahnsen got to blaming Biden for the high prices:
BAHNSEN: It’s because it’s a cultural epidemic of blame casting. It’s a crisis of responsibility. We’re going to blame Wall Street for everything that goes wrong financially. We’re going to blame oil for the prices, the oil industry. The president campaigned on this idea of attacking the industry. Now this has led to higher prices and all of a sudden, he wants to blame when really he’s getting the outcome he said he wanted.
But the worst part, Neil, is he’s going to get on a plane and go out to Saudi Arabia to do what he won’t do in Texas and Oklahoma which is approve more permits, approve more drilling, ramp up production. We have the capacity to bring prices down. We have the ability to provide our allies oil and gas in Europe, exporting natural gas and things like that. This is a decision that is being made on purpose by the White House.
FACT CHECK: As The Center for American Progress reported, “It is hard to overstate how profitable the war in Ukraine and the resulting financial pain have been for oil executives.” The top five oil companies earned $35 billion in profits just in the first quarter of this year. Exxon made $23 billion in profit last year, and $8.8 billion in the first quarter. The company cut 9000 jobs last year, and bought back “$30 billion in stocks for wealthy shareholders through 2023.” Yet, the company “paid an effective federal income tax rate of just more than 2 percent in 2021.”
You can watch Fox choose oil companies over consumers below, from the June 16, 2022 Your World.
