Y'all, Mom and Dad are fighting again.
Matt Walsh touched off a controversy (are you surprised?) earlier this week when he wrote about the urgency of sky-high grocery prices:
Grocery prices are insane. They're still rising. Addressing this problem should be the number one priority of every elected leader.
Now, this in and of itself isn't controversial at all. It's a matter of hard data.
You can see Fed charts on grocery prices showing a steady rise over the decades that took off like a rocket around 2021. This isn't just a normal inflationary increase. It's a huge jump over a short period of time.
But given that this is the Internet, of course a pretty normal and unremarkable observation launched a major multi-day fight about groceries, burritos, beef, and cooking.
(Sigh.)
First up is David Harsanyi, who tried to situate the debate in terms of historical grocery prices rather than recent ones:
1901: Average American family spent 42% of budget on food
1945: 23%
1965: 15%.
Today: 9.5% (tho we eat out far more than ever and have far more variety)
David is not wrong here. The decline in grocery prices over the past century or so has been nothing short of incredible β but he is more than a little tone-deaf.
Most of us don't care about what other people paid for groceries in 1901, we care about what we're paying today - and we're paying much more than we were just a few short years ago!
Blake Neff, a producer over at the Charlie Kirk Show, weighed in:
Americans literally spend less of their income on food than any other country on the planet.
...which led X to slap a big old community note on that remark:
[The article Blake shared] uses pre-2016 data showing the US with the lowest food expenditure share. Recent UN data shows Singapore at 6.81% (2023) vs. US at 6.95% (2022).
Bested by Singapore!
Alas, we'll never live that down.
Jesse Kelly popped in to point out the obvious (and to offer what was obviously a subtle warning for Republicans ahead of the midterms):
Andrew Kolvet at TPUSA chimed in to share an anecdote about a student buying a $20 burrito, noting correctly that it "just feels like basic things cost too much."
In response, Jeremy Boreing's producer (and former Bee Man) Joel Berry weighed in:
Every internet conservative rushing to their keyboards after Joel dropped a bomb about $20 burrito dinners:
Mr. Berry has a point: It's good for families (especially large families) to have cheap meals in rotation β something that's easy to prepare, no fancy ingredients, tastes good, everyone likes it. That's true.
But it's extremely silly to deny that there's an "affordability crisis" right now.
Of course there is! And if your response to the crisis is "you just need to make cheap meals every night," you're sort of conceding the point!
ENTER DAN CRENSHAW TO MAKE EVERYONE MADDER:
Lots of other folks on the Right had thoughts:
But THIS was the best comment of them all:
Heck, we even waded into the fray!
A lot of people aren't impressed with the "just learn to cook stuff cheaper" advice.
Matt Walsh ultimately chimed back in with a pretty compelling soliloquy, worth quoting in full:
One of the problems with this claim is that virtually no Republican was making 'the affordability crisis is fake' arguments during the Biden years. It's extremely transparent to everyone that the unwillingness to acknowledge these obvious economic challenges is at least partially politically motivated.
The second problem is that, no matter how thrifty your family might be, and no matter how cheap your homemade burritos, the significant rise in grocery prices over the past 6 years -- and the fact that the rise is continuing, not stopping, and certainly not reversing -- is just a mathematical reality. It can't be denied. It is a fact.
Grocery prices have gone up by 30 percent or more this decade. I'm happy for you if your family isn't significantly impacted by this problem. But it is real. And it is a problem. And conservatives better come up with an answer that isn't just 'learn how to make cheap burritos' or we will get absolutely crushed. That's another reality.
Well said!
Thankfully, come what may, it looks like the Berry family will be enjoying that Tex-Mex for at least another night:
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