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The typical economically right wing explanation for the rising cost of living would be that the government is spending beyond its means, resulting in money printing and inflation which ultimately enrich those connected to the government at the expense of the broader public.
But obviously Ben Shapiro and Dan Crenshaw can't make an argument like that when they're trying to justify spending untold billions on a wildly unpopular war after Trump explicitly ran on "no new wars".
Consequently, they're reduced to playing dumb, either mildly dumb by pretending it's all about the cost of food vis-a-vis other expenses or downright retarded by pretending that the issue is about literal $20 burritos and going "heh, don't you know burritos aren't actually $20". They're basically in the same position as Biden was four years ago; they can pretend nothing is wrong or they can blame the last guy. Neither is likely to work.
As I've said countless times, the main issue of 2024 was prices. Fair or not, that's what it was, and what it continues to be. The no 1 complaint I constantly saw was "Bidenflation". The no 1 sign I saw for Trump was the "Trump low prices, Kamala high prices" one. The most successful Trump ad buy was literally portraying Harris as an idealogical obsessive concerned over unimportant culture war fights (trans people in prisons) over the everyday issues the typical American deals with (prices/jobs/etc).
So what lesson was taken away from this? Nothing. Trump has pressed multiple "slow down the economy" buttons that most presidents would never push with his tariff nonsense and record pace losing war, while spending his time about the same things the typical American doesn't really give a shit about like the reflecting pool or ranting about transgender data centers (no seriously, he seemed to have mixed up "transistors" with "transgender") or whatever else.
Like I believe most of the complaints are pure vibecession both now and during the Biden era, but if you explicitly run on a platform to focus on the economy and lie and say you will lower nominal prices (because you know that's what people want) and then fail to do it, then of course people will be upset. There is literally no way around this, the GOP ran on lowering prices, and everyone can see prices are not lowered. They exploited the delusion there's a fix everything button for votes and then seem surprised that people actually believed in the fix everything button they were constantly told and promised was real.
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Depends on what area of the economy you’re talking about and even single issues have different causes when you investigate the problem across the country.
Someone I’ve known for a long-time and I were talking about this very recently. She was originally born in NYC before moving as a kid out to where I’m from, and infrequently goes back out there to visit her dad and relatives. A perennial issue of NYC’ers that’s always on the social roundtable is housing.
One of the major causes of the housing crisis in NYC is the existing institutional bureaucracy that makes building anywhere from 2x-3x more expensive and twice as slow than comparable cities. This is basically the root cause for why there's no middle class housing: because it’s not economically viable because it’s so damn expensive to build there. Or if you want to put it differently: only expensive housing can profitably get built.
The reason why bureaucrats can’t just go in and take a blowtorch to the bureaucracy though is because it would cause a lot of well-connected people to lose out on significant 'outside' sources of income. So instead we get empty, populist talks and political rhetoric and never any actual solutions.
You can go ahead and pass whatever taxes you want to, but a massive chunk of those proceeds will just get skimmed away until people dead ass serious about correcting the root of the problem, go full Gangs of New York and be prepared to butcher a few dozen people in the city square over it. The solution here isn’t "just throw more money and the government at it,” because too much government is precisely the problem.
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It is exactly the same position biden was in 4 years ago. I remember multiple debates here with an 'inflation isn't real' stan, who just trolled cherry picked statistics to explain why everyone was wrong. Then Trump won the popular vote. Now the right is stepping on the same pitchfork, and the DSA is winning.
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Regulatory costs also are another significant right wing explanation, at least among the more academic focused. And it's more plausibly true: deficit spending doesn't help costs, but that's a bipartisan issue. And the costs of health care and housing (probably the biggest actual costs, both absolutely and relative to the past; unlike food, which is cheaper than ever) are driven by regulation.
Some of it's also just the legal environment. Easily half the time I spend running my business goes toward managing insurance and compliance stuff instead of actually accomplishing any kind of productive work. And those costs apply to every level of every transaction, so prices balloon all around. Granted this is also directly downstream of overregulation.
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