Can’t anyone at the White House grasp economics — not even when they actually draw it out? Joe Biden tried to flog his claim that gasoline producers and retailers are price gouging today, this time on Twitter, as a way to escape accountability for high and again-increasing gas prices.

“When the cost oil comes down,” Biden scolded, “we should see the price at the pump come down as well.” Biden then attached a chart to back up his claim that the two have become somehow de-linked and therefore proves his price-gouging accusations.

Er … who wants to tell him?

It’s simple: When the cost of oil comes down, we should see the price at the pump come down as well. That’s how it should work.

But right now, refiners and retailers are making record profits at the expense of the vast majority of Americans. It’s unacceptable. pic.twitter.com/h3xiyEYEdv

— President Biden (@POTUS) October 19, 2022

That chart shows precisely what Biden claims isn’t true. Retail gas prices have been closely linked to crude prices all along, even remarkably so given the nature of pricing gas based on a futures-based commodities market in a volatile production environment. This chart absolutely contradicts the argument Biden is trying to make.

Matt Whitlock is amazed by this as well:

Another one to file under “White House digital team not understanding charts.”

Unless they’re *trying* to show that refiners and retailers are actually tracking really closely with the price of crude oil and everything is still Joe Biden’s fault. https://t.co/P0VZwIx33T

— Matt Whitlock (@mattdizwhitlock) October 19, 2022

That’s hardly the only dishonest take involved, either. The White House pegged this to the June 10 price in order to show all of this in terms of decline. Why not go back to the beginning of the year — or better yet, the beginning of Biden’s presidency, when prices began to rise quickly in the first place? Because to do that, the slope upward would dramatically show Biden’s energy-policy incompetence — and likely would still show the remarkably close linkage between gas prices and crude oil.

Just as this chart does. And it’s telling that the incompetents at the White House who didn’t notice what this chart actually depicts are the same incompetents running our energy policy, too.

Update: Let’s not forget that Biden and his team were taking credit for that entire down slope for restoring market mechanisms to the price of gas, too. They’re complaining about the last couple of weeks, where the two lines are not just trending the same but are closer together.