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Economic Pain 'Just Beginning' as Key Index Shows More Inflation From Trump's Iran War
"The only thing Trump has made great again is inflation," said Rep. Brendan Boyle.
May 13, 2026
Data released by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics on Wednesday showed continued upward pressure on prices, caused in large part by President Donald Trump's war with Iran.
The Producer Price Index (PPI), which measures wholesale prices paid by businesses, posted a year-over-year gain of 6% in April, the largest yearly increase since December 2022.
Energy prices, which have surged since Trump launched an unprovoked war with Iran in late February, played a large role in raising wholesale costs, as the report finds "more than three-quarters of the broad-based increase in April can be traced to a 7.8% jump in prices for final demand energy."
However, energy prices aren't solely responsible for rising wholesale prices, as the so-called "core" PPI, which excludes the costs of food and energy, posted a yearly increase of 4.4% in April, the largest since February 2023.
PPI is seen as an important gauge of future inflation for consumers, as companies typically pass the costs they pay for inputs onto consumers in the form of price increases.
As explained by Groundwork Collaborative in a social media post, the wholesale costs measured by PPI "are what companies pay before they jack up prices on the rest of us."
"What's in the pipeline now is headed straight for your grocery bill and gas tank," Groundwork Collaborative added. "The pain isn't over. It's just beginning."
CNN economics reporter Elisabeth Buchwald similarly predicted more hurt for US consumers in the coming months, arguing in a Wednesday article that a 6% increase in PPI shows "the pain will not be short-lived."
"Even if the United States were to reach a deal with Iran today, it would still take months for shipments of oil held up by the blockade of the crucial Strait of Hormuz to reach American soil," Buchwald explained. "And even then, it would likely be months—or potentially years—before Americans see gas prices return to levels before the war."
Wednesday's PPI report came one day after the Consumer Price Index showed that consumer prices in April rose by 3.8%, the largest yearly increase since May 2023.
Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-Pa.) reacted to the latest inflation data by ripping into the president's policy decisions, including the Iran war and the global trade war he started shortly after returning to office last year.
"The only thing Trump has made great again is inflation," Boyle, the ranking member of the House Budget Committee, wrote in a social media post. "His disastrous policies—from his tariff taxes to his war in Iran—are making life even more expensive. We shouldn't be surprised the guy who managed to bankrupt a casino isn't an economic mastermind."
Rep. Maxine Dexter (D-Ore.) linked the increased prices to Trump's desire to have Congress spend $1 billion of taxpayer money on his proposed White House ballroom.
"Oregonians need real relief from these high costs at the store and the pump," wrote Dexter. "We must stop the war in Iran and refuse to pay for presidential vanity projects. Oregon families want peace. They need a break, not a ballroom."
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No, Says Economist, March US Jobs Report 'Is Not Good'
"The latest jobs data show how President Trump's mismanagement of the economy—both domestically and internationally—is harming workers at home," said another expert.
Apr 03, 2026
As US Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer on Friday declared that "America's economic comeback is on full display" and the country's "workers are winning again" due to what the business press and top newspapers called a "strong" March jobs report, some economists stressed the importance of looking beyond the topline figure and one month of data.
The US Bureau of Labor Statistics announced that employers added 178,000 jobs last month, with gains in construction, healthcare, and transportation and warehousing, and declines in the federal government. The unemployment rate fell slightly to 4.3%, with 7.2 million people officially jobless.
"Folks, today's jobs report is not good," declared Heidi Shierholz, president of the think tank Economic Policy Institute (EPI). She pointed to average job growth over the past two months, the reason for the drop in unemployment ("people leaving the labor force"), slowing wage growth, and the fact that "the effects of our war in Iran aren't even in these numbers yet."
EPI senior economist Elise Gould further explained those points on social media. Although the report "came in stronger than expected... much of the gain was a bounce back to February declines (now a loss of 133,000 jobs)," she said. "As a result, average monthly growth the last two months was only 22,500 jobs."
As far as the unemployment rate ticking down, "it's important to note that this happened for the 'wrong' reasons as both the labor force participation and the share of the population with a job also ticked down," Gould continued. "Job gains were strongest in healthcare as striking workers returned to work."
"Attacks on the federal workforce continue," she highlighted, with the sector down 18,000 jobs in March and 352,000 positions since January 2025, when President Donald returned to power. "The vital services federal employees provide cannot be done without these essential workers. The cost of these losses are only just beginning."
"Manufacturing rose 15,000 jobs in March, but still has a huge deficit since Trump took office. Since January 2025, the manufacturing sector has lost 82,000 jobs," the economist noted. "Wage growth has been slowing for the last few months, particularly driven by slower growth for production and nonsupervisory workers, roughly the lower 82% of the workforce."
Gould added that "we don't have the inflation data yet to show real wage changes in March, but slowing nominal wage growth coupled with rising prices from the Iran war almost surely means real wages will suffer, contributing to worsening affordability."
Trump and Israel launched their war on Iran at the end of February, and the new data is from the middle of March, so "the impact of the war and higher fuel prices will be limited" in this report, as Center for Economic and Policy Research co-founder Dean Baker acknowledged. "April could look considerably worse."
Breyon Williams, chief economist at another think tank, Groundwork Collaborative, said that "beyond today's headline bounce, the labor market continues to deteriorate under Trump's economic mismanagement: Hiring has ground to a halt, paychecks are shrinking, and workers are giving up on finding a job altogether. A single month of modest gains can't reverse the damage that the president has inflicted on working families."
A former senior Labor Department official who's now chief of policy programs at The Century Foundation, Angela Hanks, similarly asserted that "the latest jobs data show how President Trump's mismanagement of the economy—both domestically and internationally—is harming workers at home."
"While the topline rate does not yet reflect the war's impact on the job market, wage growth has stalled, and oil prices are skyrocketing, resulting in higher prices for consumers and threatening to weaken the job market," she noted. Specifically, according to a Thursday report from Democratic members of the congressional Joint Economic Committee, Americans spent an extra $8.4 billion at the gas pump in the first month of Trump's war.
"Families are already under tremendous pressure from rising prices, slowing job growth, and mounting debt as they struggle to make ends meet, and not seeing help on the way," said Hanks. "Families and workers across the country deserve leadership that puts them first and works to make living a fulfilling life affordable for everyone. Instead, they're stuck with leaders in Washington more focused on needless and damaging wars and slashing the safety net to pay for them."
After passing a 2025 budget package that gave the rich more tax breaks by slashing over $1 trillion from the safety net, including food assistance and Medicaid—which is expected to leave millions of Americans without health insurance—congressional Republicans are considering more healthcare cuts to fund Trump's war. The Pentagon has asked for at least $200 billion for Iran, and more broadly, the president wants an unprecedented $1.5 trillion in military spending for the next fiscal year.
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Poll Shows Most in US Know Corporate Greed Is to Blame for Energy Affordability Crisis
Sixty percent of respondents blamed the energy demand of large users like AI data centers for higher household electricity costs.
Mar 18, 2026
It's been two weeks since Big Tech companies gathered at the White House to sign a nonbinding pledge saying they will not pass on higher utility costs to consumers as the rapid build-out of energy-intensive artificial intelligence data centers sends electricity bills skyrocketing—but polling out Wednesday showed a majority of Americans reject President Donald Trump's plan to leave corporations responsible for tackling the affordability crisis.
Those same companies, said most respondents to a survey by Data for Progress and Groundwork Collaborative, are responsible for higher costs that have hit households across the country, and can't be trusted to ensure life is more affordable for families.
Instead, said 61% of respondents, "cracking down on price gouging" from both utility and energy companies would be the most effective way to lower the cost of electricity. In comparison, just 35% said building more energy infrastructure to meet demands was the answer to high costs.
While Trump has been forced in recent weeks to acknowledge that "energy demands from AI data centers could unfairly drive up" people's energy costs, as he admitted in his State of the Union address while announcing AI companies would sign his "ratepayer protection pledge," the president has largely deflected blame regarding the affordability crisis—or denied its existence altogether.
Trump claimed at a rally in Kentucky last week that "the economy is roaring back," even as his $1 billion-per-day, unprovoked war on Iran inflamed tensions across the Middle East and drove up oil prices.
Groundwork said in its analysis of the poll that following Trump's announcement of the ratepayer protection pledge, "Americans reject this reliance on corporations to do the right thing."
Elizabeth Pancotti, managing director of policy and advocacy for Groundwork Collaborative, said that "utility prices are up and consumers know the truth: These price increases are being driven by corporate greed and unchecked AI data center growth."
Trump has pushed to accelerate the construction of new data centers by fast-tracking the permitting process.
Two-thirds of those surveyed said their monthly electricity payments have gone up in the past year, with nearly a quarter of respondents saying they had increased by "a lot." More than 40% of people said they are now paying between $101-$200 per month for electricity.
As Common Dreams reported last November, Trump's demand for AI companies to build massive, energy-sucking data centers in communities across the US has been linked to rising costs of consumers, with the average overdue balance on utility bills surging by 32% in the last three years and states with high concentrations of AI data centers seeing electricity prices skyrocket by as much as 16% from 2024-25.
Sixty percent of respondents told Data for Progress and Groundwork Collaborative that the energy demand of large commercial users like AI data centers is to blame for higher consumer prices, and the same percentage of people also blamed high compensation for utility company executives. Sixty-three percent of those polled said high profits for utility companies and their investors were to blame.
Joint Economic Committee Democrats revealed Tuesday that the average annual US electric bill increased by $110 last year.
A 2022 analysis by Accountable.US found that the nine largest US energy utility companies raked in nearly $14 billion in combined profits in the first three quarters of that year and handed out $11 billion to shareholders while tens of millions of households struggled with rising utility bills.
Nearly 60% of the 1,149 people polled by the two progressive think tanks also said the public sector must take a leadership role on providing energy, "because the public sector doesn't collect profits and can pass on savings to customers," and 60% said the public sector should be responsible for upgrading and modernizing the electric grid because it is a "public resource that should serve all Americans equally, not generate profits for shareholders."
Alex Jacquez, chief of policy and advocacy for Groundwork and a former Biden administration official, said the poll revealed that "the people believe in public power."
The groups also polled respondents on their opinions of "energy superusers," including cryptocurrency companies, AI data centers, and AI firms.
Crypto companies were the least popular, with 54% disapproving compared to 26% who approved. Voters disapproved of AI data centers by a 16-point margin and AI companies in general by an 8-point margin.
Nearly two-thirds said they believe new AI data centers would raise their energy costs, and voters across the political spectrum opposed new data centers in their communities.
Grassroots efforts have taken off in states including Michigan, Wisconsin, and New Jersey as community members have rejected the construction of data centers on the grounds that they would consume massive amounts of water as well as electricity, threaten jobs, and take up space that could otherwise be used for affordable housing and small businesses.
"Voters feel ripped off by the corporations who hold their utilities hostage and are calling on lawmakers to put an end to the profiteering racket," said Pancotti. "It’s time for regulators and policymakers to answer the call to protect working families from predatory utility corporations and Big Tech.”
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