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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.
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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