Grocery prices are too high; we all know it; we all get it.
They’re up about 35% since 2019 — first because of COVID-19, then because of Joe Biden’s inflationary policies. Inflation has slowed; grocery prices are up about 2.7% for the year right now.
But let’s set the record straight: Grocery prices are never coming back down to where they were in 2019. The only way for them to do that would be for us to experience a serious, actual deflationary episode, which generally means an economic depression.
Food inflation started to level out in 2023 while Joe Biden was still president, and has continued at a relatively tepid pace since. Yet the impression persists that the Trump administration isn’t doing enough to address inflation, in part because of the tariffs. Tariffs don’t target consumer prices; they target fairness in the production process and a level playing field with foreign countries
But there’s a far worse and more serious problem in the United States: Unrealistic, inflated utopian expectations.
Many young people have a completely broken set of expectations about life right now.
One student wrote, “A burrito shouldn’t cost 20 bucks.” Andrew Kolvet of TPUSA commented, “Yeah, a lot of this is a hangover from Covid and Biden-era inflation, but the lived experience is the same: It just feels like basic things cost too much.”
I agree things cost more than they should. But there is only one way in the United States of America in 2026 for a burrito to cost $20: You went to an expensive restaurant.
A burrito at Chipotle probably tops out at about $13. A top-shelf burrito option at Taco Bell runs $5.99 plus tax.
Let’s pretend that you’re a poor young student, as I once was. Or pretend you’re a dude who is just starting his work life and wants upward mobility, as I once did.
This is what you do: If you want a burrito, you head to the supermarket. Here are today’s prices via Instacart: You buy a package of 10 tortillas for roughly $4. You also grab a can of refried beans for $2.50, then grab some cheese, salsa, maybe an avocado, and nuke it in the microwave.
Boom, you’re talking about a pretty good burrito for less than $2, one-tenth of the price that student was talking about.
So what the hell are we even talking about here?
Unfortunately, this has become the mode for a lot of young people: “Why can’t I afford what my parents could afford when they were my age?”
Spoiler alert about groceries: You can. And even in areas for housing where deregulation has been the rule, you still can.
In fact, today you have more restaurant options, your food takes up a smaller share of your disposable income, and it is probably significantly better than it was back in 1950, when your grandparents were consuming, on average, about 1,000 fewer calories per day than you do now.
Food expenditure as a share of family disposable income in the United States has been flat at well under 10% since the mid-1990s. If you go back to when your parents were doing this, it was roughly 13% to 15%. But we’re constantly being told that we can’t even afford food, which is a wild exaggeration.
We are, if anything, a very overweight country, and all of this is yet another form of black-pilling.
Things can get better. There are things we can do to get government out of this business, and we should. But insane, outsized expectations of reality wreck politics. That’s because if both parties are promising you something that can never be achieved via politics, you will inevitably be annoyed. You will swivel over to the other side, and then they’ll fail, and you’ll swivel back to the first side.
Here is the deal: In the United States of America, we are fatter and richer, and we have nicer houses and nicer cars than in the past, and the food we eat is much, much better than it was for our parents, in general.
There are secondary distortions that follow from that. “You know what? We need to go back to the way it was. Our food system is broken. We need to go totally domestic. We’re talking about chicken coops in the backyard.”
I think our ancestors would have laughed at us trying to cosplay the 1850s, when it turns out that if we had lived in the 1850s, we all would have been miserable and smelly, crapping in a hole in the backyard.
Life was not great back then. In fact, if you take people from poorer countries today and you bring them to the United States, they’re not complaining about the status of our food supply.
There’s a woman we know from the Philippines. She’s wonderful, and she just brought her mom over from there. The family grew up in a shack in the Philippines with no actual floor, along with 10 siblings. When her mom came over, she walked into an American supermarket, and it blew her mind.
Why?
Because for most of the world, the luxury that we experience on a daily basis here in the United States is utterly unthinkable.
Our system is not broken. It is working really, really, really efficiently. We have one of the most efficient food production and delivery systems in the history of the world — and the cheapest.
According to the Foundation for Economic Education, the price of eggs declined 96% between 1919 and 2019. That means an unskilled laborer today can buy 24 times as many eggs as an unskilled laborer could a century ago for the same amount of work.
Does this mean everything is perfectly ideal? No. We could probably reduce food prices by 5% to 10%. All you’d have to do is eliminate tariffs and ramp up American oil production.
There is so much black-pilling, so much doom-scrolling, so much “America is terrible. Everything’s awful. No one can afford anything.”
None of this is to claim that everything is ideal.
But there’s no such thing as ideal. Everything is comparative.
Donald Trump versus Kamala Harris. Trump is far better.
America versus other countries. America is far better.
America’s living situation now versus your parents’ living situation. Comparatively, America is far better now.
Economics is a study in trade-offs. If you’re on the Right and you spend all day complaining about the production side — “What if all of our labor was both domestic and unionized and we got rid of technology? And what if all of our food was produced in Iowa and was totally organic?” — then you don’t get to complain about the prices being too high. All of your inputs just doubled.
If you want prices to go down, end the tariffs, ramp up market-based incentives for innovation, and break up useless unions. Prices will go down.
There’s one kind of silly critique that I’ve heard online. “We need to stop being distracted by foreign wars. It’s the foreign wars that are causing the food inflation.”
No, it isn’t. The war in Iran has had basically no impact on food prices in the U.S.
Here’s the food inflation percentage increase between 2016 and 2026: 2023: 2.7; 2024: 2.5; 2025: 3.1; 2026: 3.0.
That is not a gigantic bump based on the war in Iran.
If you actually want the prices to go up, you should leave Iran in charge of the Strait of Hormuz so it can keep throttling up or throttling down our prices at will, based on oil shocks.
Losing wars to failed dictatorships seeking nuclear weapons is not a brilliant trade strategy.
But put all that aside and go back to the larger point: The Right is doom-pilling; it is black-pilling, and right now it is having an impact.
Not everything in America does, in fact, suck. Things are quite good by any historical standard — much better than if Kamala Harris had been president.
That may not be a winning message in 2026, but I can tell you what a losing message looks like: “America totally sucks under Trump, and if you elect more Republicans, it will surely continue to suck. What we need is a Tucker Carlson third party. What we need is a common-good conservatism third party that totally changes everything that’s been done. Elect Democrats. Split the GOP vote. Then it’ll get better.”
This demoralization is what the black-pillers are doing right now.
Don’t buy into it.
