Exxon Responds To Biden’s Inflation Blame-Shifting Attack

Early during his first year in office, President Joe Biden and his appointees claimed that the inflation that started rising in earnest following the passage of his $2 trillion COVID relief measure last Spring was “transitory.” It was a refrain they continued to repeat for months, until it became obvious even to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and Federal Reserve Board Chairman Jerome Powell that it wasn’t transitory at all. It was at that point last December that Powell finally admitted that “it’s probably a good time to retire that word (transitory).” Yellin herself admitted she had misjudged the situation during recent congressional testimony.

As that canard was starting to lose its cache’ in October, Biden and his team resorted to blasting the oil industry for rising gas prices, with one White House official anonymously telling Reuters that “…we are using every tool at our disposal to address anti-competitive practices in U.S. and global energy markets to ensure reliable and stable energy markets.” No one in the administration bothered to explain exactly what “anti-competitive practices” the official was referring to, which frankly was unsurprising.

For the next several months, Mr. Biden and high-ranking officials like Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm and various economic advisors ping-ponged back and forth between blaming inflation on “Big Oil” and the fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic.

That bit of blame-shifting went on until March, when the administration landed on the best inflation boogeyman of all, Russian President Vladimir Putin. White House spokesperson Jen Psaki rolled out the “Putin’s Price Hike” talking point during one White House press briefing shortly after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, and a new blame-shifting narrative was born. Suddenly, Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine on February 24, 2022 became the reason for an inflation problem Biden himself had claimed to have been fighting since at least the summer of 2021.

But simplistic explanations for complex, chronic problems tend to have short useful lives, and the “Putin’s Price Hike” narrative became no exception. Not that it’s been abandoned altogether – the President himself rolled it out one more time on Friday during a press event at the Port of Los Angeles, saying “We’ve never seen anything like Putin’s tax on food and gas.”

But few in the press are really buying it anymore, and even fewer ordinary Americans. The President’s team of advisors can read the polls, and understand this as well as anyone. Thus, Biden didn’t stop his blame-shifting exercise with Putin, he also went after COVID, and then, of course, the “big corporations” who he claims “don’t pay their fair share” of taxes, singling out one well- known name specifically: ExxonMobilXOM
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“We are going to make sure everyone knows Exxon’s profits,” Biden said. “Why don’t you tell them what Exxon’s profits were this quarter? Exxon made more money than God this year and by the way, nothing’s changed. One thing I want to say about the oil companies, talk about how they have 9,000 permits to drill. They’re not drilling. Why aren’t they drilling? Cause they make more money not producing more oil. The price goes up number one and number two, the reason they’re not drilling, is they are buying back their own stock, which should be taxed quite frankly, buying back their own stock, and making no new investments. So ugh, I always thought Republicans were for investment. Exxon start investing and start paying your taxes, thanks.”

Naturally curious what folks at ExxonMobil might think about being singled out for this sort of ad hominem attack on the company’s integrity by a sitting President of the United States, I reached out for comment. I received the following response from Todd Spitler, Corporate Media Relations Senior Advisor for ExxonMobil:

We have been in regular contact with the administration, informing them of our planned investments to increase production and expand refining capacity in the United States.

We increased production in the Permian Basin by 70%, or 190,000 barrels per day, between 2019 and 2021. We expect to increase production from the Permian by another 25% this year. We’re spending 50% more in capital expenditures in the Permian in 2022 vs 2021 and are increasing refining capacity to process U.S. light crude by about 250,000 barrels per day – which is the equivalent of adding a new medium sized refinery.

We reported losses of more than $20 billion in 2020, and we borrowed more than $30 billion in 2019 and 2020 to support our investments in production around the world. In 2021, total taxes on the company’s income statement were $40.6 billion, an increase of $17.8 billion from 2020.

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The reality is that Exxon and other oil companies pay many billions in local, state and federal taxes each and every year. They pay the taxes that are required under the law, and if the government doesn’t think it’s enough, then only the government can change those laws.

Since the first Arab Oil Embargo half a century ago, American politicians have found no handier boogeymen to blame for rising inflation than “Big Oil” in general, and ExxonMobil specifically. Sadly, it’s a tiresome and cheap political game that probably will never end.