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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
I've been to expensive and gucci places and I think it completely loco to pay $20 for a burrito. If a restaurant tries to charge that much, literally walk out and go somewhere else. It's true though that restaurants in general have gotten more expensive though, but I think it's probably a structural shift in the labor market as well as the attitudes of young people getting food and ordering delivery. If there are suckers out there who will pay $30 for delivery of a shitty meal, then someone out there will charge that much.
In my personal IME groceries are up slightly but not enough that I really notice.
holy shit. my post was about how it's not about the burrito, and the complete obtuseness of the responses that focus on it, and all i get is obtuse responses that focus on it.
EDIT: Matt Walsh, making the same point:
The problem is that the affordability crisis has been complained about, acknowledged, and attempted to be fixed for at least 2 decades now. I remember that the insane cost of housing and schooling were major political issues in the mid-2000s, and even after the 2008 crash, housing continuing to inflate to such an extent that they stayed flat instead of going down like most other things was basically common knowledge. The problem is multi-faceted, we have many people who have many theories and have tried many things. They could probably do better, but a generic "address the affordability crisis" gives little to work with, and it's like going to a medical research center and telling them to "address the death crisis." They're just as eager as you to fix it, and they've been trying very hard to fix it for a long time. It's just background noise at this point.
So that just leaves the other, more specific parts, which are comprised greatly (not your post, but certainly the posts you are alluding to) by complaints like the burrito thing. So that's what's being addressed. And I think it's especially valuable, because bad arguments in favor of good positions have a way of discrediting the good positions themselves if those bad arguments are left standing too long without being cut down by the people who have those good positions. And complaining about the cost of prepared food is a very bad argument when the affordability crisis is the topic.
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