The architects of the Iran war are robbing families to pay for military escalation. We who are doing the math at the kitchen table are the ones driving out to the gas station to fill the minivan today, and the pump reads $4.56 at 5 PM, a stark reminder that the average price for a gallon of regular gas sits at $4.56 on Thursday compared with $3.18 a year earlier. For a typical summer road trip, the math maps across the Bureau of Labor Statistics data: a round-trip to Florida takes roughly 2,000 miles in a twenty-five-mile-per-gallon car, which demands $365 in gas alone, and we have to add the 20.7 percent jump in airfares from April, the 4.3 percent increase in lodging, and the 3.6 percent hike for eating out. The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy estimated an extra $3.5 billion in gasoline costs over just that Memorial Day weekend, and the Bank of America reported that lower-income households are the ones already writing off their summer travel entirely, proving that the K-shaped economy is playing out on Interstate 95 and at the TSA checkpoint.
Anne Helen Petersen writes in Can’t Even that burnout is structural, and the structural here is the budget collapsing under the weight of discretionary extraction. As distributional analyses from federal budget models demonstrate, working families absorb a disproportionate share of the inflation rate hitting the exact line items that structure a summer trip; the inflation rate for transportation is now a specific tax on movement, a levy on the physical ability of families to leave their zip codes. This is not the resilient consumer adjustment the editorial pages praise. The “choice” to go local, as one Rhode Island mother told an AP reporter, is not a lifestyle preference; it is the arithmetic of a household that cannot pay both the gas bill and the daycare receipt. This is the exact calculation we covered in the Memorial Day analysis of high fuel prices driving local vacations: the shift to shorter stays closer to home is a response to extraction, not an aesthetic preference.
The Taylor Swift catalog is the diagnostic instrument for the internalization of that extraction. “This is me trying,” from folklore, is the song that does the most analytical work here — the bridge expands into a sustained inventory of small recovery acts, the labor of staying functional inside a budget that has been stripped bare. The small recovery act of this summer is finding a relative’s cabin where the rental costs zero, and calling the absence of a flight itinerary a plan. It mirrors the way we have learned to treat every summer trip as a logistical problem to be solved by eliminating the parts of it that cost money. The corporate profit margins, the architects of the Iran war, and the airlines canceling flights to save on operating costs are stripping the joy out of movement itself, turning the American family vacation into an exercise in cost-erosion where 48 percent of registered voters have already cut back on vacation spending, according to Quinnipiac polling.
This logistical triage is the modern echo of a lost era: the Catholic working-class household that generation built on a single postal-supervisor wage operated inside a policy architecture that understood Rerum Novarum’s foundational claim that economics must serve the family, not the family serve the economy. That architecture is gone. We dismantled the safeguards that once kept mobility and stability in sync, and now the inflation numbers are the receipt, and the family is the residual. The traditional American summer is being systematically dismantled, leaving the vast majority of families to adjust their expectations or abandon their plans in the face of an economy that prioritizes market stability for the donor class over the basic mobility of the electorate.
The solution is structural intervention, not consumer adjustment. Congress needs to pass refundable childcare tax credits indexed to real costs, enact a national paid-leave guarantee, and end the military escalation driving up jet-fuel prices while leaving lower-income families with a choice between the airline ticket and the heating oil delivery. If the economy cannot support a family’s physical movement, the economy is not working for the family. The closing image is simple: the gas pump reading $4.56, the decision not to get in the car, and the realization that summer mobility has become a luxury tax.