Memes About Gas Prices in 2020 Fail to Mention the Global Pandemic That Kept People Off the Roads

Sigh...

If you have a Facebook account, you’ve likely seen the various memes going around about gas prices. You know the memes. You’re MAGA-loving uncle probably posted it or that weird friend who thinks the “red team” can never be wrong about anything. Maybe it was your mom who isn’t a conspiracy theorist but thinks Taylor Swift worships Satan.

It’s an election year, so we can expect to see posts like this. Partisan Democrats do it too on other things, like Project 2025. Don’t get me wrong. I’m vehemently opposed to the Christian nationalist and social conservative elements of Project 2025. However, there are a few things in it that I agree with, such as sound money, school choice, and free trade.

The difference is that Democrats have been successful at making Project 2025 completely toxic. Republicans who are sharing memes about gas prices haven’t been as successful. As I mentioned there are different versions of the meme, but it nearly always says something about the price of gas when Trump left office in January 2021. Some versions I’ve seen say gas was $1.79 per gallon. Others have it in the low $2.00 range.

Folks, I shouldn’t have to say this, but we were in the middle of a global pandemic in 2020 and 2021. Supply and demand is a hell of a thing. When people don’t drive, gasoline and oil prices will decline. Most of us were confined to our homes for at least March and April 2020. The businesses that could rely on telework did throughout 2020 and 2021.

Gas prices hit rock bottom in April 2020 at $1.94 per gallon. The price of crude oil fell to $15.18 per barrel that same month. The economy was also in recession, albeit a short one, caused by the pandemic. As demand began to rise because life began to return to normal, the prices of oil and gas began to increase.

Although it’s not reflected in the charts, a barrel of crude oil reached $83.15 in May 2024. The low point was in January 2024, at $72.26. The low for a gallon of gas in 2024 came in January, at $3.20, while the high was $3.73 in April.

Gas prices are, of course, higher today than they were before the pandemic. We’re still below the post-pandemic highs that we saw in the summer of 2022. Those price increases had more to do with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine than anything else. Keep in mind that Russia produces almost as much oil as Saudi Arabia. The Middle East is also a powder keg of tensions waiting to go off.

The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) has also cut its production to raise oil prices. Now, the United States produces more oil than the Saudis or Russia. That’s a trend that started in 2018 and has continued well into the current administration. In fact, the Saudis and Russia aren’t even to the output of the United States.   

The prediction for the rest of 2024 is that gas prices will continue to decline. As NPR explains, the trend toward telework, the growth of the electric vehicle market, declining demand in China, and the aging population in the United States are part of the reasons why.

I’m not sure that reminding voters where the economy was in 2020 is a smart strategy. Sure, it was because of the pandemic, but it certainly seems as though the pandemic is a scar on the American psyche that people would rather forget. You’d be better off talking about the economy in 2019, even if gas prices hovered around $2.70 per gallon.