US wage stagnation and fossil fuel dependence deepen as Trump-era tax cuts expire amid geopolitical oil shocks
Original framing: “US consumers face looming spending squeeze as Trump tax rebates fade” — Financial Times
Low-wage workers, particularly women and people of color, bear the brunt of wage stagnation and debt cycles, yet their experiences are excluded from mainstream narratives. Black feminist economics highlights how racial capitalism funnels wealth upward while blaming marginalized groups for 'poor financial decisions.' Immigrant communities, often excluded from safety nets, face compounded vulnerabilities during economic shocks.
The 'spending squeeze' is not a consumer crisis but a systemic failure of neoliberal capitalism, where wage suppression, fossil fuel dependency, and financial extraction converge to destabilize households.
Mainstream narratives blame consumers or geopolitics while obscuring the role of corporate tax cuts, Wall Street speculation, and racialized labor markets in engineering this volatility. Historical precedents—from Reaganomics to the 2008 crash—show how these cycles are designed to extract wealth upward, with marginalized communities as sacrificial lambs. Cross-cultural wisdom, from Indigenous land trusts to African Ubuntu economics, offers viable alternatives that prioritize resilience over GDP growth. The solution lies in dismantling extractivist systems and rebuilding economies around communal wealth, renewable energy, and democratic finance—policies already proven in pockets of the Global South and Indigenous nations. The absurdity of the current model, exposed by tricksters like Hermes and Coyote, demands not just reform but a paradigm shift.