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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."
So first of all... yes.
Second, this goes to the point about missing the point of the meta commentary. "Ackshully, you are doing great!" and "Ackshully, you got this other thing instead", and "Asckhully, you just aren't working hard enough" aren't acceptable answers to people asking for political focus on addressing specific things.
Burrito availability isn't fungable with housing affordability. My kids are 4 in a single bedroom, but we have more expensive burritos per square mile than when I was a kid isn't a useful point.
These are all fine empirical discussions to have in the abstract. They aren't a response to a class of people who are explaining that their political party isn't focused on the right things.
The point is that "the burrito" test is intentionally obtuse.
There is a class of voters saying, "address affordability", and the response is, "no, you're good."
That is certainly not the experience of most people 30+ years ago. My mother who grew up in the Midwest never laid eyes on a burrito until she was at least in her 20s. My father grew up in the SF bay area, so he likely ate them from a young age, but he's in a small minority. And even he didn't have access to sushi or other such "exotic" food we take for granted today.
But my point is that I think you are probably doing better than your parents and you are simply failing to recognize it (or if not you personally, then at least the average member of your cohort). Your kids are 4 to a bedroom, but you admit that is because you are simply prioritizing your spending differently. You are spending more on things like food and healthcare and in exchange receiving much higher quality food and healthcare than your father's generation did. My burrito question is emblematic of this fact. And you can't just handwave away modern cars and phones and TVs and the internet and everything else your father didn't have. You are objectively choosing to spend money to get more and better stuff in other areas of your life for yourself and your children, and in exchange you are settling for slightly worse housing. You and your family are objectively better off overall.
I completely agree we need to address affordability, because it's good to do that regardless of whether people are doing better than their parents or not. There are a bunch of simple things we can do to accomplish that, but they largely lack political support: deregulate housing and make it much easier to build, get rid of tariffs, lower taxes and government spending.
Where did I admit that?
No this isn't what is happening. I can compare exactly my father's new constuction price to his income in the early 90s and the price of a house of similar sqft today in the same zipcode against my income and the ratios are very different.
Again. telling people that there aren't actually affordability issues because you know better than them about how they're just wasteful with money is a braindead strategy, but sure keep trying to make it.
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