You know what you paid for gas two years ago, more or less. The House majority leader is betting you do not. 'You go back two years ago, we were paying almost $6 a gallon for gasoline,' Steve Scalise told CNBC's Squawk Box, before adding that 'right now it's in the threes' [1].
Here is the receipt. Two years before that interview, AAA's national average sat around 3.65 to 3.67 dollars a gallon [1]. Not six. Not five. The highest national average ever recorded in this country is 5.02 dollars, in June 2022, when Russia's invasion of Ukraine shocked the oil market [3]. American drivers, as a national average, have never paid 6 dollars a gallon. The baseline is not exaggerated. It is invented.
Data
| Scalise: almost $6, two years ago | 6$/gal |
|---|---|
| Actual, two years prior | 3.66$/gal |
| All-time record, June 2022 | 5.02$/gal |
| Now, July 8 (AAA) | 3.8$/gal |
You do not have to take our word for it, because the correction happened at the table. Joe Kernen - the CNBC anchor, no one's idea of a resistance figure - stopped him on air: 'I don't think we were at six. That wasn't the average price... You must have been on vacation in California,' pointing out the real figure from exactly two years earlier [1]. Pressed, Scalise moved the goalposts to 'two and a half years ago,' where the number is no better: October 2023 averaged about 3.53 [2].
Now the play. Why does a fake $6 matter this month? Check your own receipt from the last fill-up: the national average on July 8 is 3.796 dollars - down from June's spike as the Iran conflict cooled, and still about 65 cents higher than a year ago [4]. On a 15-gallon tank, that is about 10 dollars more every time you fill up. Against the real history, this summer reads as what it is: a war putting money back into your gas bill. Against an imaginary $6, it reads as a discount. The invented baseline is doing exactly the job it was built for.
Prices move for reasons that mostly are not any president's doing - wars, refineries, the price of crude. What a leader controls is whether he tells you the truth about the number on the sign. The real record is public, hourly, and kept by AAA, and it has never had a 6 in front of it.
