This summer, the average American family will spend nearly $800 just to keep their home from becoming a death trap — up 40% since 2020 and up 10.5% from last summer alone. Meanwhile, the Trump administration is out here pointing at the stock market like a proud parent at a school play, insisting everything is fine. Everything is not fine.
The Number That Should Be All Over the News
Eight hundred dollars. To run the air conditioner. Not a vacation. Not a car payment. Just the privilege of not dying in your own home during a heat wave.
That figure comes from the National Energy Assistance Directors Association, whose executive director Mark Wolfe laid out the full picture in a piece published by The Guardian this week. And the cooling bill is just the headline number. Underneath it sits something uglier: Americans are now carrying more than $1.2 trillion in collective credit card debt. Nearly 60% say they are living paycheck to paycheck. One in six households is already behind on utility bills. Utilities cut off electric service more than 13 million times every single year.
Thirteen million disconnections. Per year. In the richest country on Earth. Read that again.
The Stock Market Is Not the Economy, No Matter How Many Times They Say It Is
The Trump administration's economic argument, stripped to its skeleton, is this: the stock market has more than doubled since 2020, therefore things are great. This is the economic equivalent of telling someone their house isn't on fire because the neighbors have a nice lawn.
Wolfe makes the point clearly. Record stock prices and record corporate profits tell you a great deal about how wealthy Americans are doing and essentially nothing about anyone else. For the family sweating over a $400 electric bill, the S&P 500 is an abstraction. Their economy is measured at the gas pump, in the grocery aisle, and when the automated voice tells them their power is being cut off.
The people celebrating the market are, almost by definition, people who own enough assets to benefit from it. That is not most people. That is a shrinking slice of people. Washington keeps confusing the health of that slice with the health of the whole body.
Oil Shock, Iran, and $450 More Reasons to Be Angry
If the baseline energy costs weren't bad enough, the last three months piled on. According to Wolfe's analysis citing Moody's estimates, the oil market disruption from the ongoing conflict with Iran has cost the average family an additional $450. That's on top of everything else.
For a household already running a deficit between income and expenses, $450 is not an annoyance. It's the thing that pushes them from struggling to drowning. It means less food. It means skipping a prescription. It means the electric bill doesn't get paid this month, which means the shutoff notice arrives next month.
And The Guardian piece flags that the pressure isn't going to ease. The conflict with Iran continues to threaten global oil supplies. Data centers are putting enormous new demands on regional power grids. Healthcare costs keep climbing. Higher energy prices are filtering through the entire economy, driving up the cost of everything that gets made, shipped, or stored. The family budget is getting hit from every direction simultaneously.
Where the Money Actually Goes
Here is the part that should make people genuinely furious. There is money. That's Wolfe's blunt argument in The Guardian, and he's right. The United States is not a poor country struggling to scrape together resources. The question is what we choose to do with them.
Rather than expanding programs that help low-income and middle-class families cover energy costs, billions are being funneled into military operations with, as Wolfe writes, no clear objective or endpoint. Rather than investing in cleaner and more stable energy infrastructure that would insulate families from volatile oil and gas markets, we're deepening the bet on those same volatile markets and telling families to absorb the price swings in their monthly bills.
And while American families watch their budgets collapse, the economic competitors Wolfe references are aggressively building the energy systems of the next twenty years. That's not abstract geopolitics. That's the United States choosing to fall behind while also making its own citizens poorer in the process.
The Middle Class Just Quietly Joined the Crisis
One of the most important things in Wolfe's piece, and the thing that gets lost when this gets framed purely as a poverty story, is who exactly is now struggling. It's not just low-income households anymore. Middle-class families are draining savings accounts. They're carrying larger credit card balances. They're putting off major purchases not because they're reckless, but because keeping the lights on and the house livable is eating what used to be their cushion.
These are families who played by every rule they were given. Steady job, reasonable budget, a little savings set aside. And a $100 monthly increase in utility costs, stacked on top of everything else going up, is enough to break that calculation completely.
Wolfe's organization, which runs assistance programs for low-income households, is now watching middle-class families fall into the same trap. That's not a rounding error. That's a structural failure spreading upward through the income distribution.
The Dingo Take
The political class has a remarkable talent for celebrating an economy that isn't working for the people they govern. When the White House points to the Dow and calls it proof of success, what they're really saying is that the people who own things are doing well and that should make everyone else feel better. It doesn't. It makes people angrier, because they can see the gap with their own eyes every time they open an electric bill or scan their groceries.
The cruelty is in the specificity. It's $800 to keep cool. It's $450 in extra oil costs from a war most Americans didn't ask for and can't explain. It's 13 million power shutoffs a year in a country whose politicians give speeches about freedom and strength. At some point the gap between the rhetoric and the kitchen table becomes too wide to paper over with stock market numbers, and we are well past that point.
Wolfe ends his piece with a question about whether Washington is willing to admit the economy isn't working. The honest answer, based on recent evidence, is no. They are not willing. They are invested, financially and politically, in the version of the economy that is working just fine, which is the version that exists inside a brokerage account. Everyone else can keep sweating.
