Pelosi's creative graphing

An oldie but a goodie from Hoosier Pundit from Nancy Pelosi's blog (via Blue Grass, Red State)...

The only thing missing here, in terms of policy analysis, is the most important thing: the devalued dollar until President Bush and his Republican and Democratic Congresses (due, in large part, to their massive spending and debt)...

Note that last column, the red one.

That's the price that oil has gone up this year alone, when the Democrats have controlled Congress, have refused to allow any new oil drilling, have passed gutted and toothless fuel economy standard increases, and have instead voted to impose new taxes on oil drilling.

But the graph itself is highly misleading.

The chart lines halt at $100, yet the bar for 2008 essentially goes that far and no higher.

The bar for 2007 is 178 pixels high in that image (about 2.48 pixels per dollar in the price of gasoline). The bar for 2008 is only 251 pixels high.

In order for it to be the proper size in proportion to the rest of the graph, it would need to be about 333 pixels high (another 33% higher, actually).

So the real graph should actually look like this:


Oil prices have gone up more in the past seven months under the Democrat Congress than they went up in the prior seven years of the Bush administration (six of which saw the Republicans controlling Congress).

It seems clear to me that the graph should actually be entitled: "Democrat Energy Plan Fails America - Oil Prices Skyrocket Under Democrat Congress."