I opened the electric bill last Tuesday and my stomach dropped. $347 for a 1,400-square-foot rowhouse in Fishtown, and it’s only June. We haven’t hit the weeks where the second-floor bedrooms feel like the inside of a parked car. I did the math at the kitchen table, the way I’ve done it every month since Eva was born: $347 for electric, $2,400 for daycare, and the rest—mortgage, student loans, the whole tightening knot—added up to the same impossible sum. We are the lucky ones. We can pay the bill.
Millions of families cannot. The National Energy Assistance Directors Association reports that the average American family will spend nearly $800 just to keep their home cool this summer—almost 40 percent more than in 2020, up another 10.5 percent just since last summer. Americans now carry more than $1.2 trillion in credit card debt. Nearly 60 percent say they are living paycheck to paycheck. One in six households is behind on its utility bills. Utilities disconnect electric service more than 13 million times every year. Thirteen million times a year, a utility truck rolls up to a house and the lights go out—not in some abstract crisis, on an August afternoon when the heat index is 105 and the fridge stops humming. Nearly 40 percent of lower-income households struggle to pay their energy bills. This is not a rough patch. This is the design.
The stock market, meanwhile, has doubled since 2020. Those two facts belong in the same sentence, and the fact that Washington never puts them there is the story. Washington is lying about the economy to families who cannot afford to cool their homes.
The design does not announce itself. It works through the small print of federal budgets and the quiet decisions of utility commissions. When the administration proposes zeroing out the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program and Congress “restores” it with a $20 million bump that doesn’t cover the cooling-cost increase in a single medium-sized city, that’s not oversight—that’s a choice. When utilities in deregulated states are permitted to pass spiking natural gas prices straight onto your monthly bill without a cap, and the same month they send lobbyists to block a state bill that would have prioritized cheaper renewables, that’s not market drift—that’s a structural preference for making households absorb volatility while shareholders stay whole. The math at my kitchen table is the downstream output of a policy apparatus that was built to protect asset owners, not families.
What worries the economists at NEADA—people who have spent decades helping low-income families keep the lights on—is how many middle-class families are now facing the same pressures. Families who thought they were doing everything right. Families who are draining savings accounts, carrying larger credit card balances, and putting off major purchases just to stay afloat. Mark Wolfe calls this a breaking point, and he is right—but the break he is describing is not new. What is new is who is hitting the wall. The family three doors down, who had their power cut last August when the mercury hit 97, didn’t get to move numbers between columns—the column just ran out.
Taylor Swift wrote the opening line of this economy in eight words: You’re on your own, kid. That is what a decade of LIHEAP underfunding sounds like when it reaches the kitchen table. Anne Helen Petersen documented how millennials conceptualized themselves as walking college resumes, then watched the economy refuse to deliver on the investment—the burnout she describes is not a personal problem, it is what happens when a system changes the deal. Annie Lowrey puts it more directly: poverty in the United States is a choice, and so is energy poverty. The money exists to keep families cool. The question is whether it goes to them or to the asset portfolios that never feel the heat.
Rerum Novarum insists that a worker’s wages must be sufficient to support a family—not just to feed them, but to house them, to keep them warm in winter and cool in summer, to maintain the dignity of a household that functions. When Leo XIII wrote that in 1891, he was describing an economy that had decided working families were cheaper to abandon than to support. He could have been writing about the American utility bill in 2026.
The administration does not want to talk about why those bills are rising. The conflict with Iran continues to threaten global oil supplies, pushing up the price of gasoline. Moody’s estimates the oil market disruption of the last three months alone has cost the average family $450. Data centers are placing growing demands on the electric grid in regions where electricity costs are already rising. Rather than investing in cheaper, cleaner, more stable sources of electricity—the offshore wind permits the administration blocked, the grid upgrades left unfunded while our economic competitors build out their own—we are doubling down on volatile oil and gas markets and telling families the grocery bill is the price of geopolitical loyalty.
Taylor Swift wrote the bridge for this moment on Midnights: “I gave my blood, sweat, and tears for this.” Millions of Americans have done exactly that—worked the hours, paid the taxes, followed the rules—and in return they are being told to look at the Dow. The kitchen-table economy and the Wall Street economy have become two different countries, and the people running the government live in only one of them.
There is money to address this. The question is how we choose to spend it. Billions are being committed to a war without a clear objective or endpoint. Meanwhile, the federal government has not meaningfully increased funding for the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which helps families avoid the choice between cooling and food. The LIHEAP program, the utility-assistance infrastructure, the commitment to keeping the lights on for families who cannot absorb a $100 monthly increase—these are not luxuries. They are the minimum a country that calls itself wealthy owes the people who keep it running. And the fix is not abstract: LIHEAP funding must be indexed to the actual cost of cooling a household in a summer that keeps getting hotter, not to a Washington budget cycle that pretends energy bills are flat.
I sat at my kitchen table at eleven at night once and ran the numbers four ways. That was 2022. The math did not add up then. It adds up to less now. Every month I move the same numbers between the same two columns. My family is not behind on our electric bill—not yet—and I name that because recognizing that this economy is failing does not require being its worst-case victim. But I open the bill every month, and I read the number, and I know what that number means for the families in this city making less than we are and paying more for everything.
The stock market doesn’t know when a child’s bedroom is too hot to sleep in. It doesn’t track the pile of unopened bills on the counter. It doesn’t count the number of times a parent tells a kid we can’t right now and means we can’t this month either. The country is rich enough to cool every home in it. Whether we do is a choice. Right now, Washington has made its choice. And the rest of us are on our own.
Your electric bill is the real economic report. Washington should try reading it.