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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
From the literal standpoint, unless you're ordering from super fancy joint (and probably getting a personal taxi for your food on top), no burrito should cost you 20. That's completely nonsense. I literally get 4 burritos for the family at 12 bucks at taco bell on the way home sometimes and if I cook my own it's even cheaper.
But lets take it more seriously as "food prices in general are high and I'm being hyperbolic in my complaint". Well, food prices are not that high historically compared to a share of income. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/food-expenditure-share-family-disposable-income Even post 2020 is a pretty small blip on the chart compared to how much households were spending.
But fine, people are ahistorical and judging off their own perceptions rather than actual data and their own lived experience is food getting more expensive. Why is that? Well lots of it is that they're just eating out more, there was a massive spike in food consumed away from home and it now outspends food at home. This of course is more expensive, but also a choice. Or maybe food prices are just another proxy for the real financial strain in housing costs, and the pressure there bleeds over into their food budgets or something.
But honestly, I think all of this is also irrelevant. If you look at the replies of people who are pointing out that burritos are not 20 dollars, the complaints aren't "you're lying, a burrito is 20", it's "yeah but that's trash food and it's unhealthy". They're not saying it's 20 bucks at taco bell or at home, they're saying it's 20 bucks at their bougie MAHA/Gwyneth Paltrow approved entirely name brand products all organic no pesticides each cow got tucked in at bedtime by the farmer burrito joint. This what they consider the basic standard of food now and everything else is toxic non-food, plus of course the personal taxi for it, so no, a burrito does not cost less than 20 for them.
I wonder how much of this we can blame on college. 20 years ago, I could get a full meal plus a drink at the student center for under $5. A cheesesteak from a food truck was $3. Subsidized, obviously, but it's not like they tell you that.
Then you graduate and go back to the real world and watch that cheesesteak climb to $15 over a few decades and it feels like the world must have gone crazy.
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