ECONOMY & POLICY
Energy prices are squeezing household budgets, but the White House is betting Americans can outlast Iran. Not everyone’s convinced.
BY THE NUMBERS
$126 Brent crude / barrel
$4.30 Avg. U.S. gas price
26M Americans without 401(k) access
President Trump isn’t backing down. Speaking publicly this week, he compared the Iran blockade directly to earlier pressure applied to Venezuela — and made clear he sees the economic pain as the whole point. “Their economy is crashing,” he said. “The blockade is incredible. They are not getting money from oil.”
For Americans, though, the pain isn’t abstract. Brent crude has hit $126 a barrel. The national average for a gallon of gas sits at $4.30 — and climbing. The question no one can quite answer yet is how long U.S. consumers can absorb these costs before they start pulling back in ways that actually sting.
“The president is banking on the fact that we can last longer than the Iranians can.”— TAYLOR RIGGS, BIG MONEY SHOW CO-HOST
Fox Business co-host Taylor Riggs put it plainly on-air: this is an endurance contest. Iran’s currency is in freefall. Their economy was already on shaky ground before the blockade tightened. The bet from Washington is that American spending resilience outlasts Iranian political will — and so far, the data hasn’t proven that wrong.
Riggs made a point worth sitting with: higher oil prices may actually be deflationary, not inflationary, in the classic sense. When gas eats up more of your paycheck, you spend less on everything else. That crowd-out effect pulls prices down in other parts of the economy. Jerome Powell touched on similar dynamics at Wednesday’s Fed press conference. Royal Caribbean, reporting earnings this week, said customers are still booking cruises. No pullback yet.
But “not yet” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence.
Separately — and it’s a policy worth not burying — Trump signed an executive order Thursday expanding retirement savings access for low-income workers. The program mirrors benefits currently available to federal employees and includes a $1,000 annual federal match for workers who don’t have access to a 401(k) through their employer. Around 26 million Americans fall into that gap.
Riggs was enthusiastic about the move, calling it good economics and smart politics in the same breath. Whether you agree with the framing or not, the underlying mechanics are real: millions of people who’ve been structurally locked out of employer-matched retirement savings would gain a meaningful on-ramp to building long-term wealth.
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