Trump is making American families pay for his war with Iran at the gas pump.
I’m sitting at my kitchen table in Fishtown at 11 PM, which is when I do the math. The math this month has the same shape as the math last month, except the number at the gas station went up again. I filled the tank Tuesday — a quarter of what I used to spend on daycare four years ago, just to drive Eva to school. The hand on the pump handle felt like an argument I was losing.
Home Depot reports Tuesday, Target and Lowe’s on Wednesday, Walmart on Thursday, and all four will tell us what they made last quarter. The Federal Reserve will release the minutes from its most recent meeting inside the same window. Inflation is still running above 3%, and the war with Iran has pushed oil and gasoline prices higher at the pump. We are going to learn, in real time, whether the household budget can hold.
The editorial pages will spend the next seven days telling you this is “consumer adjustment” — that families are “rebalancing” and “prioritizing.” That is the vocabulary of someone who has never filled a tank on a Fishtown salary and watched the total climb past what they had budgeted. The vocabulary of someone who has never done the math. Let me translate: a family that was already running on the margin is being asked to absorb a war’s energy bill, and the earnings reports will tell us whether they’re cutting the home repair, or cutting the groceries, or cutting the school clothes for September.
The optimization regime Jia Tolentino names in her “Always Be Optimizing” essay in Trick Mirror — the regime’s demand dressed as the woman’s choice — is the spreadsheet at 11 p.m. I keep thinking about a Taylor Swift song I was listening to on the way home from the pediatrician. “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart” — she’s on tour, she’s miserable, she’s the best in the world at it. The performance is the work. The retailers reporting this week are going to show us exactly how the performance is holding: how many families showed up to the home improvement aisle anyway, how many showed up to Walmart instead of Target, how many showed up to neither because the gas got there first. The numbers will look like commerce. They will be a record of who is performing broken-heart normalcy, and for how long.
The math, run four ways, looks like this. At three-percent-plus inflation, a household at our income loses roughly a thousand dollars a year in purchasing power. Add a war that pushes gasoline sharply higher at the pump, and the same household loses several hundred to over a thousand more, depending on the commute and the region. Add the fact that groceries move with shipping costs, and the squeeze compounds. The Penn Wharton Budget Model has documented since the pandemic era that inflation runs hotter for lower-income households than for higher-income ones — the differential is sharpest in food and energy, where lower-income households spend a larger share of their budgets. A wartime spike inverts the same pattern at a higher dollar value. The median household, now earning around $83,000 by recent Census data, does not have the budget slack to absorb it.
The last time Walmart reported, in late May, the company warned that high gas prices were already dragging the second-quarter outlook. That was before the war had even begun to push oil to its current levels. The household that skips the home repair and feels quietly ashamed is doing what Taylor Swift names in “Anti-Hero” — internalizing the structural as personal, metabolizing wartime inflation into a sense that the spreadsheet is the problem.
Our household is doing better than most. David and I both work professional jobs. We have two college-educated parents who could still navigate a financial-aid form. We had a grandmother with an estate. My father retired from the U.S. Postal Service after 38 years; my mother retired from a Catholic-school nurse job. They raised three kids on a single income, sent all three through Catholic high school, and paid off their Lansdale house in 2007. That is the household model I was raised to replicate. It is the household model I cannot replicate on two professional salaries and a 7% mortgage. The math that worked for my parents is the math that has stopped working for me, and the gap between them is the same gap this week’s earnings reports will describe in corporate language.
I read Pamela Druckerman’s Bringing Up Bébé as a comparative family-policy text, even though it is shelved as a parenting manual. French households do not absorb wartime gas-price spikes because France does not start wars that drive its own fuel costs. They also do not face American-scale childcare bills, because the French state subsidizes crèches, maternelle from age three, and the rest of the structural supports that make a working household budget workable. The U.S. counterpart’s structural conditions are not equivalent and cannot be made equivalent through individual parenting choices or household optimization. Other rich countries are not waging a war on Iran. American households are paying for one.
Someone decided to start this war. Someone decided how to respond to the energy shock it created, and chose to let households absorb the bill rather than the industry that profits from it. Someone decided that the Fed could tolerate above-target inflation while families made it work. Those decisions were made by named people in named rooms, and the cost of those decisions is being paid at the pump by households that did not make them. Pew has been measuring household financial stress for years, and the line keeps going the same direction — not because Americans got worse at budgeting, but because the costs being asked of them keep going up while the wages and supports stay where they were.
A windfall tax on wartime oil profits, a real federal paid-leave program, and a public option for childcare would not end the war. They would keep American households from subsidizing it. The retailers will report. The Fed minutes will be parsed. The analyst calls will focus on guidance, on margin, on whether the consumer is “resilient.” The kitchen-table question — what did you not buy this month, what did you put off until the next one — will not appear on any of those calls. It will appear, though, in the mix shift.
The mix shift is the household. The receipts are coming Tuesday. The retailers will tell us what we already know: a quarter tank of gas and a kitchen-table spreadsheet is what an unnecessary war costs. Someone is making a lot of money off this.