Meet the War Tax No One Voted For
There's a certain school of thought that says $100 oil is a temporary price worth paying for strategic objectives — that the economic disruption is short-term and manageable, and worrying about it now means losing sight of the bigger picture. This argument tends to come most easily to people whose mortgage is already covered.
Here's the bigger picture that argument skips over: Brent crude crossed $105 this week. WTI is above $100. Gas at the pump hit $3.79 per gallon — the highest since October 2023 [1]. For the median American household, that's noticeable. For households in the bottom income quintile — who spend roughly three times the share of their budget on energy as the top quintile — it's not a talking point. It's a crisis at the kitchen table. When gas goes up, groceries go up. When groceries go up, rent goes up. That's how the math works when you don't have a lot of slack in the budget.
This is what economists call the regressive nature of energy price shocks. The burden doesn't fall proportionally. It falls hardest on the people who drive the furthest to work — often because they can't afford to live close to it — and who heat their homes with oil or gas, and who are least able to swap in an EV or a heat pump right now. The war economy has always had hidden costs. The question is always who pays them [2].
