The economy looks “bleak,” as Americans spend down their savings — to the lowest rate in years, according to Axios. Lower-earning Americans are the hardest hit, and are increasingly strapped for cash.

“They’re literally running out of money at the end of the month,” Kraft Heinz CEO Steve Cahillane told Bloomberg last week. “We’re seeing negative cash flows in the lower-income brackets where they’re dipping into savings.”

Some CEOs have “warned that their customers are struggling to deal with rising gas prices and higher inflation.”

Indeed, lower-earning households opted to buy 7 percent less gas in March as prices skyrocketed, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. “They likely took public transit a bit more and tried to carpool, Axios reported.

But even higher-earning Americans cut back on buying gas, although only “modestly.”

McDonald’s CEO Christopher Kempczinski is warning that higher gas prices are hitting lower-income Americans hardest.

The price of gas has increased roughly 45 percent from when Trump was sworn in as president last year. The national average hit $4.52 per gallon on Monday, per AAA, up from $3.13 the week he was inaugurated.

Some lower-income earners appear to be holding on to their savings, but they’re being strategic.

Heather Long, chief economist at Navy Federal Credit Union, said on Friday that “they seem to be bracing for higher prices to remain in place for a while,” Axios noted.

“Inflation is wiping out wage gains,” Long warned on Friday on social media. This is the big Achilles Heel in the US economy.”

“Wages are being eaten up by inflation due to the war in Iran,” she added. “This is a big shift from the past several years when wages were growing well above inflation. Yes, workers have jobs, but this is a squeeze.”

Overall, Axios noted, “economic woes may be confined to just the lowest earners. Higher-income shoppers are still driving growth at both McDonald’s and Walmart, the companies said.”

As it stands now, higher-income earners are keeping “the overall picture looking good, while underneath the headline numbers, it looks bleak.”

READ MORE: ‘Fundamental Miscalculation’: Columnist Says Democrats Have ‘Little Chance’ in Midterms

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Democrats made a “fundamental miscalculation” in the redistricting wars and now have “little chance” in the November midterms, argues Eric Garcia at The Independent.

Calling the Virginia Supreme Court’s nullification of a voter-led ballot initiative that allowed the creation of four Democratic congressional districts a “massive body blow,” Garcia also points to the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision “virtually nullifying the Voting Rights Act” by requiring Louisiana to redraw its congressional map. There is also the Tennessee legislature turning majority-Black Memphis into another GOP seat — erasing the only Democratic seat in that state.

“And this does not count the redrawing of congressional districts in Missouri and North Carolina before the Supreme Court decision, or Alabama, which is under a court order to not redraw its map until 2030,” Garcia says. He notes that California has been the only state to respond, doing so by adding five Democratic seats to the state.

Zachary Donnini, the head of data science at VoteHub, a political news outlet, “put it bleakly for Democrats.”

Donnini says that now, instead of having to flip just three seats to take the majority in the House, Democrats will have to flip an additional nine seats — a total of twelve in all.

Democrats tried to “lead by example,” but, Garcia says, they turned their states into “laboratories for democracy” by creating “unilateral” disarmament “on behalf of the Democrats” — an act, he labels, a “fundamental failure.”

But he offers Democrats a little hope.

Texas’s redistricting plan relied on Hispanic voters, “after flirting with Trump,” to stay aligned with the GOP. That might have changed. The situation is the same in South Florida, “where the state’s normally conservative Cuban Americans have been caught in the Trump immigration dragnet.”

Pointing to inflation, the economy overall, and Trump’s Iran war, Garcia says Republicans holding on to the House might be “even more difficult.”

Democrats, however, made a “fundamental miscalculation,” Garcia concludes. “By creating guardrails and rules, Republicans did not see a reason to compromise and meet them halfway. It made them targets for weakening. Now, Democrats have put themselves in a bind. They only have themselves to blame.”

Image: Public Domain by Architect of the Capitol via Flickr

President Donald Trump is “bored” with his Iran war, but Iran is not — and isn’t ready for the war to be over, argues Jonathan Lemire at The Atlantic.

The president, now in a “bind,” is tired of the war he started, and has declared victory several times, while Iran “does not want the war to come to a close.”

Trump’s GOP “is warily watching rising gas prices and falling poll numbers,” while the president “doesn’t want to be bogged down in a Middle East conflict like some of his predecessors were. He doesn’t want it to upend his high-stakes summit next week in China. He is ready to move on.”

“The president, five aides and outside advisers told me, is convinced that he can sell any sort of agreement as a win. But at least for now, the man who wrote The Art of the Deal can’t even get Iran to the negotiating table.”

Iran hasn’t even responded to Trump’s one-page memo “that is far more of an extension of the cease-fire than a treaty to end the conflict.”

Trump, Lemire says, did not expect the war to go like this. After his successful excursion into Venezuela, he “set his eyes on Iran, telling confidants that it would ‘be another Venezuela,’ a pair of outside advisers told me.”

It has not been that.

Trump expected his Iran war to last days, or maybe a week or two. It has now been months.

And while administration officials believe the blockade will be successful, experts say Iran can withstand it for months, time the president, with the midterms coming, does not have.

“It then becomes a matter of pain: Which side can withstand the most economic hardship?” Lemire asks.

Trump, impatient, has debated declaring victory and moving on.

“Secretary of State Marco Rubio went so far as to say earlier this week that the war was over,” Lemire notes. “But doing so now would leave the conflict’s goals, as outlined at various times by the president and his aides, unfulfilled.”

The president, says Lemire, “wants the war to end. He wants a deal. But deals take two parties, and there’s no evidence that Iran is interested in bailing Trump out of a dilemma of his own making.”

Image via Reuters