The War Tax, Updated: Six Months In

Back then, the war was supposed to last a few more weeks.

It has now been 24 weeks since the first strikes, and the conflict has settled into a boxing match with infinite rounds: fight for a bit, go to your corners, fight some more. Except the audience — us — takes the punches. Gasoline is still elevated. Groceries have held surprisingly flat, at least so far. Diesel, which moves every grocery by truck, has not (more on that inside the tool).

But are we really suffering? It depends.

Our May piece painted a diverging picture: most of us pay the higher costs, while for a few, stock-market gains (entirely unfazed by the median American's squeeze) dwarf them. But that coverage came before we fully understood how to put our data journalism on AI steroids. Months later, the war hasn't changed. Our skills have.

So today we humbly offer an interactive tool to compute your own War Tax and set it beside the median American's, and beside the roaring wealth creation of the top 1% and top 0.1% since the war began. Play around with it. Note the tabs across the top; use the arrows or the navigation buttons to see the whole story. The headline is simple: if you had serious non-retirement money in the market on February 27, the war has netted you out just fine. If, like the median American, you had nothing in the market, you're in the hole.

There are many takeaways in this tool, nearly all of which I don't plan to discuss. What matters is how the math makes you feel. Depending on your circumstances, you may feel very differently. The point is to see how others are experiencing this war, and to decide for yourself whether that feels right, justified, and sustainable.

My takeaway is this, and it's simply math. It is unfair, irresponsible, and mathematically erroneous to say all Americans benefit from stock-market appreciation. Yes, the market is open to everyone. But your benefit depends on what you can set aside to invest (or speculate). If you have a lot to set aside (that is, if you're part of the elite), you benefit. If you're struggling to make ends meet, you don't. Maybe you stretch to put away $500. Maybe you borrow to do it. Even then, the AI-fueled market doesn't offset your higher gas costs. But $98 million in the market, like the average top-0.1% household? The gas costs are so small in comparison they don't even register on the chart.

That's my takeaway.

Feel free to share yours.