You probably have noticed that gasoline prices are again on the rise. Predictably, I have already seen stories arguing about President Trump’s culpability in this current price rise. It never fails that when gasoline prices decline, a President and his allies are quick to take credit. And when prices rise, the opposition party is ready to cast blame. After all, this must be someone’s fault. In fact, it’s usually never quite that simple. An argument that I laid out in my book Power Plays was that a sitting President’s policies rarely have an impact on gasoline prices, or on energy production in the short-term. This is pretty clear if you look at the energy polices of Presidents since President Nixon. Delayed Impacts During the Nixon Administration, most Americans grasped that energy security was slipping away from us, as oil exports were increasingly controlled by OPEC. In October 1973, America’s […]