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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
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.
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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