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The online discourse, I've been watching this week is the $20 Burrito. As a super TLDR; this is an intra-right argument that got started by one conservative saying young conservatives are upset about food affordability, and gave an offhand example about '$20 burritos'. The response was a combination of:
Burritos aren't actually that unaffordable, the rate of increase in unaffordability has come down, also you can make them at home for cheaper, also you aren't entitled to eating out.
The response to the response is that this is a losing message to one's own side, avoids accountability for losing focus on why 2024 went Trump, and suspiciously aligned to Iran war support.
Before I address that specifically, a little about my personal burrito.
I am as close to a controlled middleclass experiment as possible.
I live in the same zipcode I grew up in; my kids go to the same Catholic school I went to. I work in the same industry as my father. I aspire to give my family the same life I grew up with. I can't live the life my parents lived.
In the 90s my parents moved us into a new construction. Today, I live in smaller a house, on a smaller lot built in the mid-70s. In realtive terms, I live in a house that is not only smaller, but nearly 50 years older than the one my father did.
My parents had >8 kids. I have 5.
Here's the kicker: My father was an individual contributor, software developer. I am a Director-level at a mid-market software company; This isn't title inflation, I manage an org of about 25, including multiple layers of leadership.
While being considerably more successful than my father in my career, I financially struggle to same life he lived.
I don't disagree with any of the above points, or probably other reasonable ones, but they all miss the point: I want to live the life I grew up in, I am willing to work hard for it, I held up my part of the implied social contract, I think that the failure of the implied social contract is a BAD thing, something to be seen as regrettable, and I want my politicians to focus on fixing it.
Burritos aren't actually that unaffordable, the rate of increase in unaffordability has come down, also you can make them at home for cheaper, also you aren't entitled to eating out.
This is all arguably true. But yet, is a losing message. Especially when your side won on addressing the real and percieved reasons we can't get affordable burritos, and super especially when the other side's solution is 'free burritos for our friends, mass immigration for our enemies'
The US middle class opportunity has changed in negatives ways for reasons that don't benefit me, and I didn't ask for, and instead of my political side agreeing to help address these issues, they are telling me to support a foreign war
Apply the burrito test to your own life. When your father was your age, was a decent burrito available at a nearby restaurant at any price, let alone $20? Unless you live in certain places like California, the answer is almost certainly "no."
Also, how often would his father go for a burrito? Not in cases where it's logical (like when travelling, or something unexpected happened) or as a social occasion, but just "I don't feel like cooking, or I don't feel like eating what we have at home, I want a restaurant burrito"). Compared to OP himself. I dunno for him, but ordering or eating out due to simple laziness or "cravings" was something that happened on a yearly basis to my family growing up. Weekly for me. The avocado toast meme is straightforwardly true, just on work lunches over 15 years of working every day downtown, I spent as much extra over cooking my lunches as I have been able to save for my retirement. I would have had doubled my net worth that I accumulated on my own had I been smarter exclusively on work lunches, if nothing else. I am, and I assume many if not most in my generation, THAT bad with managing my expenses.
Now I find myself kicked back up to the same point my parents were at my age due to inheritance and I am desperately praying to find the strength to do better this time, but still. I'm not sure we can blame the economy for most of it. I would more likely blame the culture for creating a generation or two with an attitude to "small" expenses that basically assign them a cost of 0$ and let that balloon into giant amounts.
My father would regularly take us out to a burrito place after swim practice, especially if my mom was out pet sitting for someone. Because it was getting late and we were hungry and he's the man so he only cooks fancy meals on special occasions not dinnerslop. This was before Chipolte was as big as it is now, but it was basically the same concept - and affordable.
And we'd get take-out cheese pizza weekly on Fridays because we're Cathoilc.
It used to be that McDonalds and Carls Jr and other fast food things were affordable to someone in the middle class. Not every day, but weekly. And a monthly sit down restaurant on birthdays or other lesser holidays.
My parents would also comment that when they were kids they couldn't afford meat every day and that we were lucky. And so maybe my kids are better off than that. Though in the last few years we've had a lot of intentionally meatless weeks, now that I think of it.
The standard of living rose. Maybe only a handful of generations got to feel it, but for a few decades things actually were quite good. And now they are declining. Maybe that decline is to a baseline that's still pretty good. But a certain demographic sees the decline in their own lifetime.
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Yeah, according to my parents and grandparents, when in the seventies nobody thought about running to a local restaurant for food because you didn't want to cook. You ate a sandwich or you cooked, and that was that.
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Again this kind of commentary is missing the point.
But moreover, no. "You're just eating out the otherwise advantage you would have over your father" is trivially not true. That's why I brought up my life as natural experience. I live basically the same life that was grown up in. It shouldn't need fine tuning to be able squeeze into. Especially when I am so much further in my career.
My father was a mid level engineer in the 90s, even by generous standards, I make twice what he was making in inflation adjusted dollars. My house and family are half the size.
You're telling a lot of people they're missing the point. They're not missing the point. They're disagreeing with you.
Housing, food, and educational costs are real, measurable things that can be tested against your personal experience. Some of them check out against your perceptions, some don't. But it's also relevant, all the ways in which your life and the things available to you are different than when your father grew up. Saying "I want the same life my father had".... Well, too bad? The world is different. Your children also will not grow up in the same world you did.
Now what you're saying is "My world is worse than the one my father had." And that's debatable, which is why people are talking about lifestyle inflation and burrito availability, and you're stomping your foot and saying "No, no, you're missing the point!" But really, this is the point.
no see my addendum post. my point is the messaging strategy, not the object debate.
This is not a good party line to justify a shifted focus from domestic policy to Iran. sorry. that's my point.
"too bad" is a retarded way to talk to your base.
If a party rose up and promised to put boomers in the golag and give their houses to families raising children, and I voted for them, and you ask me why, the answer is, when I told you I couldnt afford a house to fit my family on a director level salary, you told me 'too bad'.
Housing, healthcare, and education costs are real things to complain about. For Catholic k-12 education specifically prices have risen because bishops no longer wish to subsidize it, despite the many downstream effects of not doing so, but higher education, healthcare, and housing are all multivariate problems which are expensive because no one in positions of influence really cares about keeping costs down. That's reasonable to complain about and seek policy changes over.
Rising food costs are not real, however. Grocery inflation is much slower than wage growth. What drives rising food costs is poor spending discipline- doordash is certainly the most visible example, but ordinary families didn't use to eat steak very often and Americans now think it's unhealthy to eat carbs.
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Okay, fine, but that is also why people are voting for the DSA. Like you, their anger may be understandable but their reasoning is, as you put it, retarded. Maybe your base does need better messaging (the Dems certainly do) but it's not surprising you're getting tripped up by people pointing out that the things you claim are, uh, not necessarily true.
I'd prefer people engage with facts rather than demanding their anger and resentment be given a populist head-pat.
If you're paying attention to the twitter kerfuffle, this isn't an ask for a populist head pat. There are specific asks.
Stop it with Iran. Deport more people. Stop it with H1Bs. Stop having high level official GOP politicians make sneaky amnesty pitches. Pass the save act.
You can disagree with whether those solutions will actually help. But it's being evaded by the um, ackshully burritos are only 14.59 in my area, and how dare you poors eat them anyway. IRAN CAN'T HAVE NUKES!
The burrito debate is also the propositional nation debate is also the Iran debate is also whether MAGA is America First or controlled opposition + foreign adventures.
Tell me if I'm getting the argument here:
You feel your life is worse than your father's.
When people argue your beliefs are factually incorrect, you say its about "the messaging strategy, not the object debate."
Based on your feelings (which need not be true at the object level), you believe you are entitled to submit a list of "specific asks" to someone (?) who is for some reason obligated to implement them.
Can you flesh out the last part?
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Well, no argument here that MAGA messaging sucks. But you know the phenomenon of all those Bernie bros who turned Trumpers? I think it not unlikely a lot of burrito MAGAs will turn into DSAers.
The fact that you initiated this as you being angry that you think your father had it better than you is why people are debating that. You did a poor job of framing this about whether or not your party is appealing to its base.
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Restaurants would basically have not existed before the 1990s if people ate out as infrequently as you imply. There are stats on food spending at and away from home and since the 1980s the share of food spending at restaurants has gone from maybe 40% to 55%, not increased by a factor of 52 from people going yearly to weekly.
I'm not sure exactly how the difference is made. It's the experience I had and most people I know had. Maybe I'm in a bubble. Maybe people went out socially more often? My local Wendy's, the closest fast food to me, seems to be surprised and unprepared whenever I decided to go there in person. They have a normal sized for a fast food restaurant dining area, but it's always empty. Even the drive through seems underutilized. The staff is mostly just fulfilling doordash/uber eats orders non-stop.
In general the cost of ingredients and food has gone down compared to wages, so I would imagine we've invented new ways of making fast food more expensive to compensate. Having everything delivered would be one.
I ate out somewhat less as a kid too, but not quite as infrequently as you describe. I've seen many other people make the same argument as you though. There's probably some degree of social bubble effects, maybe you're upwardly mobile, and I would also guess that parents with young kids tend to eat out less often than people at other stages of life.
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Franchise fees and real estate costs have gotten bonkers over the last ten years. Unless you're a real estate company masquerading as a fast food joint like McDonald's, this can be back-breaking.
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As a geriatric millennial, I feel like I saw a transition from restaurant/delivery-is-occasional-treat to restaurant/delivery-is-alternative-of-near-equal-stature-as-home-cooked in real-time growing up. Especially having spend much of my initial childhood in Korea, which was further back compared to America in development, especially in the 80s/90s. In Korea, we basically ate the same home cooked meals with very minor variations in side dishes every single day, and America was little different in the 90s. But as I grew up, getting takeout or delivery for dinners just seemed more and more common. Nowadays, I've seen people claiming that eating the same country's cuisine two days in a row - to say nothing of the same meal - is just unacceptably boring and a standard that no one should be subject to, which I find a ridiculous standard; a clean, warm, predictable, nutritious-enough, and fairly palatable meal every day is a standard I'd consider quite good enough for everyone of any class. Of course, most people don't go to such extremes, but I see that sort of attitude of bare-minimum-expectations-creep a lot.
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