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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.
I think a major issue is that some specific things that people really enjoy have surged massively in price, sometimes in ways that aren't reflected in inflation.
For example ground beef where I live is effectively up more than 100% since 2020 both due to price increases and the almost complete lack of meaningful sales. If you're price conscious and your usual diet consists a lot of ground beef this will feel outrageous.
Agree that beef prices massively surged, especially ground beef, but somehow pork and chicken are down. I think this points at a major habbeing in the beef industry in particular, rather than generalized massive inflation.
My cope is buying whole briskets and grinding them, because somehow ground beef is now regularly more expensive than brisket.
Beef issues seem to be industry specific. Similar issue with coffee during the Biden years. It wasn't inflation that jacked the price so high, it was a few years of extreme weather events that disrupted harvests (though apparently one of the issues in 2023 was that so many people were trekking to the US that there weren't enough laborers to handle the harvesting.
For beef, herd levels are at a low point for apparently weather-related reasons. The gap was being closed with imports, but there have been issues with that, including the expansion of screwworm and standards/safety issues. The topic is a Big Fucking Deal among certain parts of the MAHA faction that I only really catch in passing.
I also remember $5 eggs last year, glad that's over
Yeah, egg prices got insane, but that was another industry specific thing. Some birds tested positive for an avian illness and one of the last acts of the Biden admin was an order to purge something like 100 million chickens, which was either a reasonable safety precaution or a malevolent overreaction, I have no grounding to discern between the two.
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