Imaginary vote fraud isn't the only big lie that Republicans are trying to foist on the American public. The GOP is also trotting out the narrative that President Joe Biden is to blame for rising gas prices. This is economic nonsense — the global oil market drives pump prices — but experts say Biden may share the blame in one way: The nation's recovering economy is driving demand that is helping drive up prices. That's a good thing.

National average prices for gasoline have topped $3 per gallon, about $1 higher than a year ago. The main reason isn't mysterious: Refineries worldwide cut back production during the pandemic, in response to the fact that drivers around the world were driving dramatically less. Now, with public confidence growing amid rising vaccination rates, and summer beckoning pandemic-fatigued families back to the road, demand for gas has spiked. Prices took their initial leap when a major U.S. oil pipeline shut down amid a ransomware attack — which had nothing to do with Biden.

As with lumber, automobiles and other goods that have seen price spikes, it's a matter of basic supply-and-demand economics — but it's on steroids thanks to the economic rollercoaster ride the pandemic caused. (In fact, gasoline prices were higher under Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush.)

Yet the usual suspects — right-wing media, conservative faux-experts, Republican elected officials — are spouting the usual fiction. Some, like Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, falsely claim the price hikes are a result of Biden's environmental policies restricting drilling. Economists can debate whether Biden's environmental policies might inflate energy prices over the long run, but no rational player suggests they could possibly have had that effect already, especially since much of that agenda is tied up in court.

Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio — one of the worst of the worst in terms of spreading the corrosive lie that Biden wasn't legitimately elected last year — took to Twitter to more generally blame gas prices on "President Biden's economy!" If by that he means that employment, wages and consumer confidence have all grown lately at a faster pace than the post-pandemic economy can yet accommodate, he's right. Would he rather those things weren't happening?

America, as always, still has among the lowest gas prices in the world. That's the result of generations of policies driven by a mindset, engrained in the nation's politics, that cheap gas is a national birthright. America ultimately will have to debate whether it's possible to evolve toward a more carbon-neutral economy with that mindset intact. The current debate isn't that one, though; it's a more simple issue of fact versus fiction regarding the causes of the current price hike. And the GOP, as is so often the case these days, has come squarely down on the side of fiction.

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