For most people, watching gas prices raggedly rise over the past year has not been a welcome sight. Higher gas prices means not just greater personal expense refilling the car, but everything delivered by gas powered vehicles gets more expensive. Yet there are some who are trying to spin higher gas prices as positive.
The attempt to spin bad news in the Obama economy as not so bad, or even good, isn’t new. When the official level of unemployment pushed over 10% in America, Stories about “funemployment” started to show up in 2009:
Unemployed college graduates were portrayed as having more time to travel and relax! Losing your job meant that you had more time to volunteer and do those things you kept putting off! Natalie Portman thought the recession was exciting:
Now, with gas prices pushing up toward $5 a gallon, the spin has already begun. MSNBC ran a piece entitled, ‘Why you should love $5 gas’ recently, with bullet points about why high gas prices are great, ranging from how fewer people will die on the road if we drive less to how airline prices will go up, shortening security lines at the air port, to how wars will get too expensive to wage and tyrants will topple when we stop buying their gas.
The writer “doubleace” is particularly optimistic about this, to the point of absurdity. The idea that a critical commodity becoming too expensive will somehow result in less conflict is difficult to believe. And if this person truly wanted tyrants to stop being propped up by gas dollars, wouldn’t they be first in line calling for domestic oil production?
To be certain, the left tends to view cheap gasoline as an evil, particularly academic leftists such as President Obama, who has made it clear he prefers higher prices to reduce driving and push people to buy electric cars or ride public transportation.
Its just hard to imagine this sort of reporting by anyone under a Republican presidency. It isn’t hard to find the stories of woe and condemnation of President Bush when gas prices were this high in 2007. But then, inconsistent economic coverage of Democrat and Republican presidents isn’t exactly new.
