Trump’s Bill: $4,500 to $7,500 Out of Every Granite State Household This Year

The gas spike is the part you can see. Behind it: the largest U.S. tariff regime since 1947, a deportation program contracting the labor market, a Federal Reserve under criminal investigation, and a federal interest payment that just crossed $1 trillion a year. Four decisions in Washington, one bill at your kitchen table. Here is the accounting.

The price at the pump gets its own news segment. A gallon of regular in New Hampshire ran $4.49 in mid-May, up from $2.96 the day before the strikes on Iran. That number is real, and it hurts. It is also the smallest line on a bill that most Granite State families will not fully see until it arrives in their groceries, their mortgage rate, their heating oil delivery, and the labor market their neighbors work in.

Add it up and a typical New Hampshire household will pay somewhere between $4,500 and $7,500 more in 2026 than it did in 2024, across fuel, food, housing, goods, and services. The largest chunks of that increase trace back, by name, to specific decisions made in Washington since January 2025. This is the accounting that does not fit on a pump display.

Tariffs: The Largest U.S. Tax Increase Since 1993

According to the Tax Foundation, the effective U.S. tariff rate rose from 2.4 percent in 2024 to 7.7 percent in 2025, the highest level since 1947. Customs duties collected by the federal government jumped from $79 billion in 2024 to $264 billion in 2025, a roughly 200 percent increase. The Tax Foundation estimates the average per-household cost at $1,000 in 2025 and $1,500 in 2026. These tariffs are the largest U.S. tax increase as a share of GDP since 1993.

Pass-through to consumers, according to the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, now exceeds 50 percent: slower than the near-100 percent observed during the first Trump administration’s tariffs, but still meaningful. Goldman Sachs estimated tariffs added roughly half a percentage point to inflation in 2025, with another 0.3 percentage points expected in the first half of 2026. Powell publicly attributed “the entirety” of inflation’s rise above the Fed’s 2 percent target to tariffs. The Congressional Budget Office projects tariffs will keep raising inflation by about 0.4 percentage points in both 2025 and 2026, eroding household and business purchasing power.

Trump told voters that foreign countries would pay the tariffs. Powell told the truth six weeks later. The cost shows up on grocery shelves, in furniture stores, and on Amazon, where third-party sellers in April began passing through a 3.5 percent fuel and logistics surcharge. The households that thought tariffs were paid by foreign exporters are the households now paying them.

Immigration Enforcement: The Labor Market Shock

The Trump administration’s mass-deportation program, escalating since January 2025, has produced measurable effects on the U.S. labor market that the data is only now beginning to capture. A 2026 National Bureau of Economic Research paper found that immigration enforcement produced “a negative and significant impact on employment of U.S.-born male workers with at most a high-school education” in industries with high undocumented-worker concentrations: construction, agriculture, manufacturing, and wholesale. The mechanism the White House promised, where fewer immigrant workers means more jobs for native-born Americans, is running backward. Immigrant and native-born workers in these industries are often complements, not substitutes. When one shrinks, the whole operation shrinks.

The Economic Policy Institute, modeling the administration’s stated goal of deporting four million people over four years, projects 3.3 million fewer immigrant jobs and 2.6 million fewer U.S.-born jobs by the end of the period, with the construction sector shrinking by 18.8 percent. A joint study by the American Enterprise Institute, the Brookings Institution, and the Niskanen Center estimated the policy will cut 2025 GDP growth by up to 0.4 percentage points and raise inflation by an additional 3.5 percentage points over time.

The early data confirms the modeling. Agricultural employment fell by 155,000 workers between March and July 2025. Housing permits in March 2026 were 7.4 percent below the prior year. Construction jobs were down 1.5 percent year-over-year in April 2026. Powell has described the broader labor market as “low-hire, low-fire.” Nonfarm payrolls actually declined by 92,000 in February 2026, with unemployment at 4.4 percent. For New Hampshire, where seasonal hospitality, dairy, and construction all lean on immigrant labor, the squeeze lands on housing costs, restaurant prices, and any project that needs framers and roofers this building season.

The Federal Reserve in the Crosshairs

The Fed has held the federal funds rate steady at 3.50 to 3.75 percent through the first five months of 2026, after three rate cuts late in 2025. Holding rather than cutting reflects an explicit recognition that the Iran-driven oil spike, layered on tariff-driven inflation, has made further cuts hard to justify under the Fed’s dual mandate, the legal requirement to keep both inflation and unemployment low at once. As of late May, markets are pricing in either one rate cut in 2026 or none, with some forecasters expecting rate hikes in early 2027.

That posture put the Fed on a collision course with the White House. The administration pressed publicly and repeatedly for deeper cuts, with the President calling Powell “Too Late” on Truth Social and demanding immediate action. The Department of Justice opened an investigation into Powell over Federal Reserve building renovations, an inquiry Powell described publicly as a pretext for weakening Fed independence. The administration also tried to fire Fed Governor Lisa Cook, a case now before the Supreme Court. Powell’s term as chair ended in May, and the President swore in Kevin Warsh as the new Fed chair on May 22, 2026.

The Powell-era Fed mostly resisted. The Warsh-era Fed has not yet been tested. If the new chair caves to administration pressure for rate cuts while tariffs and oil are pushing prices up, the dollar weakens, imported goods get more expensive, and the inflation Powell spent five years fighting comes back at higher intensity. That is the open question with the largest downside in the entire U.S. economy right now, and it has a direct line to every Granite State mortgage, car loan, and small-business line of credit.

The Debt Trap

The Congressional Budget Office’s February 2026 baseline projects a fiscal year 2026 deficit of $1.9 trillion, 5.8 percent of GDP, against a 50-year average of 3.8 percent. The cumulative deficit through April 2026 had already reached $1.2 trillion, with five months of the fiscal year still to go. Gross national debt stood at $38.56 trillion as of early February. The CBO projects gross federal debt rising to $63.7 trillion by 2036, which would be 136.4 percent of GDP.

The number that matters most for households is the interest. The federal government paid $970 billion in interest on the national debt in 2025. That figure is projected to top $1 trillion in 2026 and reach $2.1 trillion by 2036. Interest is now the fastest-growing line item in the federal budget. Through the first seven months of FY2026, interest payments are running 6.4 percent above the prior year even though the Fed cut its short-term policy rate, because long-term Treasury yields, the rates that drive mortgages and corporate borrowing, have risen as bond investors demand more to hold U.S. debt at current trajectories.

The translation for New Hampshire: even if the Fed eventually cuts rates, mortgages and auto loans may not follow as fast as in past cycles. The bond market is increasingly setting the price of money, and the bond market does not vote. Federal debt service also crowds out the federal dollars New Hampshire depends on, from highway funds to Medicaid match to the defense contracts that anchor the Seacoast economy.

Consumer Confidence and the Squeeze

The Conference Board’s Consumer Confidence Expectations Index, the forward-looking sub-index economists watch as a recession indicator, has been below the recession-warning threshold of 80 for more than 13 consecutive months. The headline confidence index rose modestly to 91.8 in March 2026 but fell again into May, with the Conference Board noting that “the weight of rising costs due to tariff passthrough and spiking oil prices was evident.”

Recession-probability estimates entering 2026 ranged from 30 percent (S&P Global) to 49 percent (Moody’s Analytics). Moody’s projects real consumer spending growth slowing to about 1.5 percent in 2026, with cooling wage gains and softer hiring tightening household budgets. Two-thirds of consumers told the Conference Board in May they had cut back on overall spending. Deloitte’s 2025 holiday retail survey found 57 percent of consumers expected the economy to weaken in 2026, the most negative outlook in that survey’s history, which dates to 1997. The household sector was already pulling back on spending before the Iran strikes added 54 percent to the price of gasoline.

How Much of This Is Trump?

Whether the accounting above is fair or partisan comes down to three categories: direct policy decisions traceable to specific Trump administration actions, conditions inherited from earlier administrations and longer trends, and the gray middle where causation is shared.

Inherited and Long-Term Conditions

Several conditions predate January 2025 or arise from longer-term forces.

The fiscal deficit trajectory. The CBO baseline shows federal deficits exceeding 5 percent of GDP under both parties since the COVID-19 emergency. The 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act and the COVID-era spending packages of 2020 to 2021 both contributed. The $1.9 trillion deficit continues a trajectory neither party has reversed.

The aging U.S. refining fleet. The contraction of U.S. refining capacity, particularly in California and the Pacific Northwest, has been underway since the early 2010s and reflects state regulatory choices, market economics, and capital decisions made over fifteen years.

The post-COVID inflation environment. The 2021 to 2023 inflation episode predates the current administration and was driven primarily by pandemic-era supply chain disruptions, energy markets, and stimulus from both administrations.

OPEC+ production discipline. The decision by Saudi Arabia and its allies to maintain production cuts is set in Riyadh, not Washington. U.S. influence over those decisions has been limited under multiple administrations.

The Federal Reserve’s rate path. The Fed cut three times in late 2025 and held through 2026’s first five months on its own statutory mandate, not at the President’s direction. The path of monetary policy, including the overshoot that forced the 2022 to 2023 hiking cycle, spans multiple administrations.

The Accounting

A typical New Hampshire household will pay $4,500 to $7,500 more in 2026 than in 2024 across fuel, food, housing, goods, and services. Most of that bill is attributable to direct 2025-2026 administration decisions. The largest chunks: tariffs ($1,500), Iran-shock fuel costs ($1,500 to $3,000), and tariff-and-immigration-driven inflation in food, housing, and consumer goods (the remainder). The share attributable to inherited or long-term conditions, deficits and debt-service costs and aging infrastructure and post-pandemic inflation residue and OPEC choices, is real but smaller in immediate household-budget terms than the policy-specific items.

The Tax Foundation, the Federal Reserve Chair, the CBO, the NBER, the EPI, the EIA, Goldman Sachs, Moody’s, the Conference Board, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Brookings Institution have all published versions of this accounting in the public record over the last fourteen months. Voters were not asked whether they wanted to pay this price for these policies. They are paying it anyway.

The Bill You Don’t See

The pump price has its own news segment. The rest of the bill arrives by mail, on grocery receipts, and in next winter’s heating oil delivery. It’s bigger. Oil shocks move through the economy in three waves.

Wave 1: Direct Energy Costs (0 to 3 months)

This is what is already happening. Gasoline up 54 percent since February. Diesel at $5.64 a gallon nationally as of mid-May, 62 percent higher than a year ago and only six cents below the 2022 record. Jet fuel has tracked proportionally and airlines are already revising fares. New Hampshire residential heating oil jumped from $3.91 to $5.41 per gallon between February 23 and March 30, a 38 percent rise in five weeks. The state’s average household uses 600 to 800 gallons per winter, so the difference between $3.91 and $5.41 fuel works out to $900 to $1,200 in additional heating costs, landing between October and March.

Wave 2: Pass-Through to Goods (3 to 12 months)

Trucking is the backbone of American retail. When diesel costs 62 percent more, every shipped product costs more to deliver. April 2026 producer prices were up 6 percent year-over-year, with consumer prices rising to 3.8 percent in April from 2.4 percent in January. RSM US chief economist Joe Brusuelas is now projecting near-term inflation at 4.5 percent, contingent on Hormuz. Bunker fuel for container ships is up 21 percent globally and 164 percent at the Singapore spot price. Aluminum is up 17 percent year-to-date. Helium, a byproduct of liquefied natural gas with about a third of global supply moving through Qatar via Hormuz, is in shortage, directly hitting semiconductor manufacturing, which means it eventually hits the price of anything with a chip in it.

Wave 3: Agricultural and Industrial Lag (6 to 18 months)

The bill that has not yet fully arrived is food. Petroleum-based nitrogen fertilizers are essential to industrial agriculture. Higher feedstock prices mean higher fertilizer prices, which mean either smaller crops or higher input costs passed through. Either path ends at the grocery store. Food prices in the March 2026 CPI were already up 2.7 percent year-over-year, before the fertilizer shock has worked through. Federal Reserve research on past oil shocks found that “second-round effects,” how oil prices feed food and core inflation with delay, added roughly half a percentage point to advanced-economy headline inflation for 18 to 36 months after the 2022 Russia-Ukraine spike. The 2026 shock is larger and arrives on top of an economy that has not finished digesting the last one.

The Bottom Line

The broader economy is undergoing a transformation that nobody campaigned on by its actual name. Tariffs at levels not seen since 1947. Deportations at a pace that has measurably contracted the construction, agricultural, and manufacturing labor pool. A Federal Reserve under simultaneous political and prosecutorial pressure during the first inflation episode of the new administration. A national debt that has hit $38.56 trillion with interest payments approaching $1 trillion a year. An oil shock layered on top of all of it, started by Trump’s decision on February 28, 2026.

The combined 2026 household impact, visible and invisible bills together, falls somewhere between $4,500 and $7,500 above the 2024 baseline for a representative New Hampshire family. The largest specific chunks are attributable, by name, to identifiable policy decisions made in Washington since January 2025. Granite Staters were not asked. They are paying anyway.

Most of this bill is set in Washington, beyond the reach of any vote cast in New Hampshire. One piece of it is not. The state gas tax is the single line on this bill that an official in Concord can change with a signature — and Governor Ayotte has so far refused. For what New Hampshire can actually do about it, and the specific demand Granite State Report is putting to the Governor, see the companion editorial, $4.49 Gas, a $290 Million Cushion, and the Tax Holiday Ayotte Refuses to Call.