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Housing, healthcare, and education have real affordability problems, but food prices consistently lag general inflation. The grocery unaffordability really is mostly lifestyle creep- potatoes and pasta were once the staples, nobody ate prime cuts of steak very often, etc. Casseroles, spaghetti and meatballs, etc are still cheap if you have even a little bit of flexibility in ingredients.
Now it is annoying that some specific items- like beef- have gone up in price. But it is not proof of general grocery inflation.
This, specifically, is much more expensive because bishops in the US have generally embarked on a policy of reducing subsidies towards catholic schools and have entirely failed to realize that this means dramatic price rises and fewer people going to them. Catholic school in the eighties often charged only a nominal tuition to tithing parishioners because the diocese ate most of the bill.
Almost everything in the chaos in institutional Catholicism is due to that single policy trend.
Certainly so. But this is a good example of the broken discourse. That is a real response to the problem of Catholic schooling. "but think about how many more computers your unaffordable Catholic School has!" or "just homeschool your kids" are not. Extend this analogy to political solutions to the broader affordability converstaion.
There was never a program to subsidize beef or housing for all or nearly all American consumers, however- although red meat subsidies have been a thing in Argentina.
There simply wasn’t a single policy choice that drove up housing costs in major metros, or healthcare costs more broadly, or education costs everywhere. The Catholic church’s decision to stop subsidizing the education of its members is a single cause problem, unlike these things.
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