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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
Sometimes I feel like the data is capturing an accurate average of a highly lumpy picture.
My extended family is scattered to the four winds. The difference in outcomes in different circumstances and different regions is shocking.
The lucky ones in Northern Virginia are doing great. They all have six figure government-adjacent jobs and they bought homes before the real estate market exploded. Their retirement funds are bursting at the seams and their hardest decisions are whether Becky is taking dance lessons or violin lessons this year. The unlucky ones in Northern Virginia either live in run down shitty rentals an hour and a half away from their jobs that cost an increasing fraction of their paycheck every year, or they're reaching the point where they have to sell their farms.
The lucky ones in Pennsylvania are doing great. They work in healthcare or education and they bought their homes before the real estate market exploded. I don't think they could get fired unless they committed a felony on the clock. The unlucky ones in Pennsylvania can't hold down a decent job because the plants keep closing, and several have had to sell their homes because they have to desperately move around to follow the work. The skyrocketing cost of rent makes it harder and harder every year.
I have no lucky relatives in Kentucky. They're all doing their best to not starve to death as they try to recover from the floods a few years ago. There's very little work. The environment is hard on cars. It's reaching the point where they can't even afford to move out of the area. Drugs are a common escape.
I don't have any more relatives in West Virginia. They're all dead. The deaths over the last five years were not due to natural causes.
I don't disagree with @iprayiam3. I also don't disagree with all the people telling him that he's wrong because Actually Look at Line - Line Go Up. Line Definitely Go Up. I've read the same graphs as everybody else. I can't disagree with the direction that Line Going.
On the other hand, it feels like the truth of the average person doing better is obscuring another, separate truth, which is that the American middle class lifestyle is more precarious than ever, and a concerning number of people are falling through the cracks. It points to a structural weakness in our country that troubles me, both because it's a structural weakness and because so many people choose to use Line Going Up to avoid even discussing it.
My cousin who died of a fentanyl overdose after he got hurt in a forklift accident doesn't give a shit about how big his TV is. His widow doesn't really care either.
My cousin who's working 60 hours a week at three jobs just to make rent is doing his best. He's working far harder than I do. When my uncle smugly tells him that he "should invest in them mutual funds, boy", he's missing the entire damned point.
I'm reminded of a quote from Jeff Bezos
Clearly, a lot of people think something is wrong in this country. It's easy to suggest that the people complaining are retarded, lazy, and wrong. After all, Line Going Up! Look at Line! If Line Go Up, why aren't you Going Up along with aforementioned Line? The thing is, that's exactly what the quote above is trying to warn us about. But if that's true, what the hell is actually wrong? What data are we missing that prevents us from getting a clearer picture?
I have some thoughts. I don't know if they're complete, or even correct, but I want to get them down.
One thing I've mentioned repeatedly above is the cost of housing. I don't think it's the whole picture, but it really seems like housing instability has an outsized psychological impact. It also tends to be the biggest single monthly cost most people have, so even a small percentile increase tends to be a big bottom line number.
At the same time, there are fewer and fewer places where a person can exist in public for extended periods without a financial transaction involved. This goes back to the $20 burrito. Maybe it's not universal, but for hundreds of miles around me, public libraries are cutting hours or shutting down. Small corner bars dying along with their owners and getting replaced by Another Goddamned Chipotle. You can't shoot darts at a Chipotle on a Friday night. You can't even linger for too long before they ask you to buy another burrito. The end result is that if you want to be out of your house, you're either deep in the woods, or you're spending money on another goddamned burrito in a way that simply didn't happen 20 years ago.
On top of that, job security is getting worse. Layoffs used to be the kind of thing that would get an executive fired, because it meant that they fundamentally misunderstood the nature of their business and client demand. Nowadays layoffs are just good clean fun that will probably result in the bosses getting a bonus. It was a lot easier to have a positive outlook about a meagre lifestyle if you know it represented a solid floor. That's less true in the year of our Lord 2026.
Am I ignoring the fact that Line Go Up? No, I am not. In fact, I'm one of the lucky ones. I have been able to capture some of the Upness of Line, and I'm doing better than I ever expected to do in my life as a result.
At the same time, the fact that this discussion is even happening suggests that there's something wrong that we're not capturing. When people say "It's just lifestyle creep," I'm reminded of the line from Chernobyl when Dyatlov says "3.6 Roentgen. Not great - not terrible". He's making decisions based on the readings while simultaneously not considering the limitations of those readings, and coming to a specious conclusion as a result.
Keep harping on Line and its Up at your peril. Calling people lazy and retarded and wrong feels good in the short term, but it feels like it's dangerously close to shooting the messenger. The fact that they're not communicating it in clear, quantifiable terms doesn't mean there's nothing there.
Yeah, my sense is that that is a big factor. I have no statistics to back this up, but I live in the Northeast United States and my sense is that a lot of the new single family houses being built in the suburbs are very very far from the cities with the jobs. So that the average price of a house is misleading. And in fact, one of the results of building more housing far away from the city is that road congestion increases, arguably raising the premium for housing which is more convenient to the city.
I would have predicted that work from home would fix this problem, but at least for now, the situation seems pretty lousy.
Anyway, I think it's also worth noting that this is a factor which seems to have changed considerably over time. In the 1970s, notwithstanding the high interest rates, it was possible to buy a single family residence in the inner suburbs of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, etc. on a much lower income than what is required today, relatively speaking. Since then, it seems like things have really gone downhill. (Or uphill, if you happen to have bought a house decades ago.)
Yes, because the places closer in are already occupied. It's worse in places with Urban Growth Boundaries; you can't build closer in because it's occupied and you can't build further out because that's to be left as a playground for the planners. Then YIMBYs come in and want to replace single-family homes with apartments.
Ok, well anyway you slice it, I think it's a significant part of the reason young people today often feel poorer than their parents. Economic activity and job growth has concentrated in 5 or 10 big cities while at the same time, there's basically the same number of single family houses in locations convenient to those cities. So it's become much more expensive for a young family to get a basic 3-bedroom house in a nice suburb. Anyway, that's my personal theory, I have no data to back it up.
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