When I saw the $20 burrito debate go nuclear, I perked up right away, because…as you may know, I’m something of a burrito aficionado, myself. But as the furor over the overpriced burrito exploded, this oddly viral debate immediately (and predictably) fractured into several recalcitrant camps. There’s the boot-strappers who said “oh shut up and cook your burrito at home for $3”, then there were the “that’s not happening” people, and then (of course) the “It’s the Jews” crowd blaming it on Israel and the Iran war.
Interestingly, it was the latter group that essentially spawned all the other reactionaries. Put aside the buffoonish trend of blaming Israel for everything, it’s emblematic of this obnoxious trend of hijacking a problem and shoehorning in your pet peeve as the singular cause of a relatively complex and long-term problem. I think in any normal universe, if someone were to simply post about how expensive food is, we’d all just nod and agree because, it is way more expensive. We all see it, and the prices of food have exploded logarithmically in recent years. The costs have made those of us on the Millennial/Gen X cusp sound like our grandparents, waxing poetic about the good old days of the 59/79/99 Taco Bell menu. The reality is, food costs are out of pocket, Taco Bell burritos are $6 now, but we’re not allowed to discuss it (let alone understand why), because in this era of hyper-tribal politics, every issue immediately fractures into a proxy war against the President.
For the President’s detractors, there’s a collective amnesia of the hyperinflation of the Biden years, and they eagerly place the burrito blame on the war in Iran. The President’s supporters, terrified about their bleak prospects in the midterms, are fully aware that inflated gas and food prices are weighing down the political odds against them, so they’re very defensive about anything that highlights the plain reality that expenses are becoming unmanageable right now. Their knee-jerk reflex is to either scold the poors and tell them to cook at home or simply deny that food is too expensive; both tacks are extremely unwise in this political moment, but the latter is particularly foolish. You can’t look at people who are legitimately struggling and stressed over the economy and tell them that they’re fine. Even if they’re placing blame in the wrong basket, you still can’t reprimand them for expressing their pain.
When you pinch your sciatic nerve, oftentimes it will cause referral pain all the way down in your ankle. If you’re a podiatrist, and a patient tells you their ankle is messed up, it’s your duty as a physician to explain to them the complex mechanism by which the radiculopathy in their hip is actually creating the downstream problem. You wouldn’t dream of saying “your ankle is fine, you idiot!”. But when it comes to economic pain, that’s exactly what many pundits are doing.
If we’re going to get past the reactionary partisan jabs and actually fix this problem, we have to establish if the problem is real, in the first place. Just because someone said it online, doesn’t make it true. Are burritos really $20? No. They aren’t. I eat burritos almost every day, I would know. Now, are there a few places with captive markets like a resort or an airport or a college campus where burrito prices are gouged to $20? Sure. Hell, there are $27 smoothies at Erewhon, but that doesn’t mean “smoothies cost $27”. They cost a third of that everywhere else, and just because they can cost that somewhere, doesn’t mean they do cost that, generally.
A primary reason burritos are more expensive is because beef cattle herds in the US are at near historic lows. Wildfires are actually a significant part of that. In recent years, we’ve had massive plains fires in Texas and Oklahoma, and more recent ones in the interior northwest that have devastated cattle herds and their grazing lands. The 2024 Smokehouse creek fire burned a million acres and killed around 15,000 cattle. Injured animals were culled, thousands of miles of fencing and untold tons of hay were destroyed, local ranchers were devastated. The financial impact of this should be obvious, even with just a cursory understand of supply and demand. Before we had a burrito debate, the cost of eggs was the hot button issue in the previous election cycle, and that was the result of President Biden culling nearly 200 million chickens in an overreaction to bird flu. Eggs have come down in price since then, but unlike chickens, it takes years to raise a calf to slaughter, so the economic fallout from a depleted cattle supply will create cost pressures for long after the initial shock. There were some attempts to import south American beef, but that was met with fierce resistance by American farmers, so the problem has become more complicated. But that’s not the only economic shock causing ripple effects today.
At some point, we will have to reckon with the fact that we shut down the world’s largest economy over the flu. You can’t do that. You can never do that. Not for global wars, not for nuclear holocaust, you never ever shut down your economy. Despite what decades of communist propaganda may have you believe, concern over the economy isn’t just vanity, it’s not greed…the economy is the proxy for our collective lives. Shutting down the economy means people die from missed cancer screenings, business owners kill themselves because their legacy family restaurant shuts down for good, people can’t afford basic human needs. We crippled the global economy and attempted to backfill the void by printing more money than had ever been printed in the history of human civilization and doled it out with alacrity. This grand experiment in universal basic income led to hyperinflation on a level that we only see in collapsing communist countries. The factories went dormant while the money printer went “brrrrrrrr”, so with too many dollars chasing too few goods, there was only one predictable outcome; prices go to the moon.
It will take decades for us to absorb and dilute the shock of the deluge of cash flooding into our economy. In 2015 in Mexico, eight straight days of torrential rainfall on Cozumel flooded the coast with freshwater. This temporary disruption of the salinity in the marine ecosystem was devastating for aquatic life, and it took years for the system to stabilize and recover from that singular shock. Similarly, it will take decades for us to absorb and dilute the shock of the deluge of cash that flooded into our economy during the government’s irrational shutdowns.
Unfortunately, this reckoning with our past mistakes is unavoidable. We can’t legislate nor print our way out of the most colossal fuck-up in the history of economic policy. No government program can unring that bell. The $20 burrito is a teachable moment: NEVER SHUT DOWN YOUR ECONOMY. EVER. The problem is, we have short memories, so nobody is going to connect the expensive burrito to the bad choices of yesteryear. It’s like yelling at your cat for crapping on the floor…by the time you get home and see it, they’ve forgotten they ever did it, so they have zero clue why you’re yelling at them. The lockdowns were years ago, and the Iran war is right now, so what gets the blame? The pain is in our ankle, not the pinched nerve in our hip, so what gets the blame?
Alas, we are stuck. The food is burning a hole in our wallets, nobody seems to understand why, and we can’t actually fix it, because the ghosts of covid past will take years to exorcise. All I do know is that chastising people for hurting economically is political suicide. The only way out of this is financial literacy. Remember the cheap TVs? We have to acknowledge that not everything is getting more expensive. Just certain things. Food, cars, utilities, college tuition, housing…interestingly, all things in which government has an outsized heavy hand intervening in the market. Government doesn’t subsidize nor intervene in the TV market, so the market finds efficiencies that lead to lower and lower prices.
In markets where government flips that script, the economic impact gets flipped, too. In markets like Austin and Nashville, housing costs are plummeting, despite them being the most popular cities in the country. Why? Government stays out of the way and just lets developers build there. In California, despite a mass exodus, housing continues to get more expensive, because government won’t let people build, and onerous squatters’ rights laws pervert the market and cause downstream effects that further cripple the quality and quantity of housing supply. Government doesn’t just hurt housing. Cash-for-clunkers was an insane and heavy-handed government program that took nearly a million good cars off the road and bricked them, sending auto prices skyrocketing because of the artificial plunge in supply. Federal taxpayers backstopping college student loans just incentivize universities to jack up tuition. While it used to be that students only took out loans for tuition they could afford, with the Federal government now underwriting their defaults, there’s no limit to what they can “afford”, so colleges charge whatever the hell they want.
Every time government intervenes, cost goes up, and quality goes down. The more socialism we implement, the worse things get. And the worse things get, the more socialism people demand. It’s a positive feedback loop that only leads to one place: Venezuela. Hyperinflation, economic stagnation, and a thoroughly demoralized population. If we continue on this path of economic illiteracy, we can forget about burritos, we’ll be eating zoo animals for protein like they did in Caracas. At this point, federal taxpayers are subsidizing meals for 40 million Americans. 1 in 9 Americans don’t pay for food, and that number continues to rise. This creates an artificial demand pressure in the food market that only makes costs go up for everyone. That number is only increasing; socialism is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I, for one, don’t want to eat zebra burritos. I also don’t want to eat $20 burritos, but we do need to eat our just desserts for going along with the insane government shutdowns of our economy. There are consequences to electing communists. There are consequences to allowing socialist policies and heavy-handed government manipulation of our markets. And this is the lesson here. Never let communists run anything. Should we cook at home more? Sure. Should that be our answer to voters who complain about the cost of living? Of course not. They have every right to be angry. It’s the adult’s job to make sure the pitchforks face the right direction. And that’s not Iran 2026…it’s Sacramento 2020.
Good read! I’m excited to read more of your writing.
What’s your best burrito in LA? Mine is from unnamed stand on corner on 25th and Pasadena