The Dow Jones Industrial Average punched through to a fresh record this week, its first since February, while the University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index sat at 49.8 in April, a reading the survey treats as recessionary. That gap, between Wall Street running and Main Street flinching at the checkout, was the through-line of Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo’s Wall Street on Friday, hosted by Taylor Riggs, with Congresswoman Claudia Tenney and fund manager Adam Johnson trying to square the two.
Johnson’s framing was what he called the three E’s: earnings, the economy, and AI-driven growth. The numbers back him up. Corporate profits hit $4.35 trillion in the fourth quarter of 2025, up 10% year over year, and S&P 500 operating earnings, on Johnson’s read, have just finished a sixth straight quarter of double-digit gains, accelerating to roughly 26%. Profits from the information sector, the cleanest read on tech and AI capex, reached $317.7 billion in the fourth quarter, the highest in the dataset.
Why groceries still hurt
None of that pays a grocery bill. The Consumer Price Index reached 332.4 in April, up 1% in a single month, and prices have climbed every month for a year. Roughly 90% of Americans tell pollsters they expect prices on groceries, housing, prescription drugs, and gas to keep rising. The energy line is the cleanest tell: West Texas Intermediate crude settled at $112.25 a barrel on May 18, a 31% jump in a month and roughly 98th-percentile pricing for the past year. Above $100, oil functions as a tax on every household.
That is the policy opening the Trump administration is trying to walk through. An administration official quantified the rollback of Biden-era commercial refrigeration rules as more than $2.4 billion in savings on grocery prices, freight, and air conditioning, with the Trump Rx program expanding through partnerships with discount pharmacies. Whether $2.4 billion in compliance relief actually shows up at the register is the open question. Refrigeration is a real line item for grocers and trucking fleets, but margins are thin enough that some of it gets pocketed before it reaches the shelf tag.
The tax base is moving
Tenney’s contribution was the demographic story underneath the price story. She cited roughly $68 billion in wealth leaving New York between 2019 and 2023, with more than $600 billion in cumulative outflows, much of it landing in Florida and Texas. The numbers track. New York carries the highest adjusted state and local tax burden in the country at $10,828 per capita; Florida sits at $5,110 and Texas at $5,897, and New York ranks 50th on the Tax Foundation’s 2025 State Competitiveness Index while Florida ranks 4th and Texas 7th. The political point matters more than the index: when high earners leave, the schools, transit, and Medicaid programs middle-class families lean on get funded by a smaller base.
Tenney also tied the last gas spike, over $5 a gallon in upstate New York, to the Biden administration’s release of 180 million gallons from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, framing the current approach as structural rather than drawdown-driven.
What to watch
Two signals will decide whether the disconnect closes before the midterms. First, the May CPI print: if shelter and food at home decelerate while energy keeps climbing, the administration’s deregulation pitch gets a real test. Second, sentiment. Michigan sentiment has fallen 11.5 points since its July 2025 peak of 61.7. Markets can keep ripping on AI earnings for another quarter or two. Voters cannot.
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