The New York Fed now documents what economists have long feared: low-income households are cutting back on gasoline as prices rise, while wealthier households absorb the increase without changing behavior. This is not a recession in the aggregate-data sense — it is a two-track economy where price shocks function as a tax on the bottom half and an inconvenience for the top. The last time fuel costs imposed this kind of regressive structural divide, during the 1973 oil embargo and again in 1979, Congress responded with fuel assistance programs and conservation mandates; the political pressure was bipartisan precisely because the pain was visible in every congressional district. Today the aggregate numbers look stable enough to suppress that pressure — which is exactly why the divergence is politically dangerous and democratically distorting.