As someone who pretty much never goes out to eat or gets delivery, I was very much Tweeting like Crenshaw during the Biden area.
At the same time, there is something really visceral about grocery prices, and yes, I felt the same way under Biden. I can’t get over paying more than TWO DOLLARS for one apple. Yes, I could buy cheaper apples etc, but I like cosmic crisp, and that’s what the closest grocery store charges. I can’t get over how a salary that would have been considered posh ten years ago now isn’t enough to get by on. And yes, I know grocery prices drastically falling would be massively deflationary and an economic crisis. But none of that changes my outrage that ONE APPLE costs more than TWO DOLLARS!
This isn’t a solvable problem, even though Trump is making it worse. The “affordability crisis” can only be overcome by broad economic growth and people eventually forgetting that apples used to cost less than TWO DOLLARS! That’s not going to happen before 2028, but hopefully we get a Democratic president, and it happens by 2030
Is there ever a case where people don’t just rebrand the policies they already believe in as though they will help affordability though? Trump is not gonna suddenly advocate for taxes on rich people, a balanced budget, and free trade.
TCJA lowered everyone's taxes by about the same number of percentage points. Stop with this regressive tax cuts nonsense. The system is highly progressive. Biden and Obama's unwillingness to touch taxes on 99+% of Americans just as problematic as Trump's policies. We have a revenue problem, not a progressivity problem. Come on Matt, you're better than this.
The injustice of New Yorkers *only* facing a 57% all-in top marginal rate. SMH
I get that a lot on the right on indifferent to the poor but I would suggest a healthy portion do - they just have significantly different ideas about to help them. I think reducing it to that probably isn’t gonna be the most helpful.
I do think the Walsh/Crenshaw/etc comments tend to illustrate how little of Republican policymaking operates at the model level, and basically tends to flow from moral-intuitional rules.
I did a quick unscientific AI comparison of Chipotle burrito prices compared with BLS median full time worker earnings over time, and it seems like a chicken Chipotle burrito (with no add-ons and before tax/tip) has stayed costing between 18 to 22 minutes of median wage labor for at least 20 years. It’s overall been pretty stable.
Median wage has increased by about 38% since 2019 (largely because lower-end wages have increased post-COVID). Chipotle chicken burritos have increased by about 35%. This seems to be about parity, but: how many Americans have had a 38% increase in their actual take-home pay in that time? I bet it's lower than you think. Social security retirement benefits have only gone up 28.8% and those are supposed to be indexed to COLA. (And we're just ignoring the elephant in the room, i.e., the huge cost increase in beef, which has increased much more than chicken.)
It’s not done to make anything look different than it actually is. There are different indices that are meant to convey different information and answer different questions. It’s all transparent, and if your business or personal well being depends on knowing different aspects of price fluctuations the data is available.
it's a coherent argument, but how often do you buy a tv or new electronic gadget? Once all the rooms you want to have tv's have tv's, you don't need any more for a long time. This year our household has bought: 1 bluetooth speaker and one new water fountain for the kitties. I'm glad they were affordable for us, but those kinds of semi-durable goods getting cheaper don't matter as much as other things like housing, consumables, and services getting much more expensive.
Housing - ok you're 18 years into the mortgage you took out on 2009 - calculate inflation. It sure seems like people are assuming everyone is buying a new house every year.
No that would actually be deflation is the price for that product actually went down.
But we should stop using normal technological progress to hide real inflation
where you really get into trouble with this of course is the composite index. The fact that tech got better and TV's are better is used to offset actual price increases in food, housing, medical etc
So people look around and say yeah, my TV's better but I can't afford to pay more rent or put food on the table...
If you're someone for whom paying for Chipotle burrito is actually a reasonably high cost vis a vis your income, than there is a good chance you actually saw a reasonably significant increase in your wages from 2021 to 2024 given wage increases were concentrated at the lower half of the income scale. In addition, you very likely eligible for a) all the various stimulus checks b) enhanced unemployment. Given America has 331 million people, I'm sure there are people out there of limited means who a) for whatever reason didn't benefit all that much from Covid financial measures b) are working for the same exact wage they did in 2019. But in general, based on data, on solid ground to say majority of people on the lower income scale really did have materially more money in their pockets today than in 2019 even of unfortunately a lot of that increased financial benefit has been eroded by inflation.
I don’t know. I think a lot of middle class people really are struggling. You had a class of people who were saving 0-10% of their paycheck each cycle, and now everything (rent, groceries, electricity, streaming) is way up. Salaries may be up too, but it takes only a little bit of mismatch to wipe out that cushion.
Take a worked example. Someone who made $60,000 in 2019 and saved $6,000 “should” now be making $82,800 if their salary kept up with median wage. That would net them $8280 per year assuming all prices rose at the same rate. But say their salary only rose 29% during that time: now they’re making $77,400 and their savings cushion is now only $2,880 per year. At 24% or so, your cushion evaporates. Or say your rent went up more than burrito prices: now you’re really just screwed. It’s very easy for people to get wiped out and not be “the rich”.
Intellectually, Dan Crenshaw and Marc are right, the problem is that people REALLY like ordering takeout even when they really shouldn't be doing so AND these price spikes are second-order impacts of a war nobody asked for! Imagine if FDR launched WW2 pre-Pearl Harbor on a party-line basis with no explanation, no justification, he'd be ripped to shreds by the media of his time and correctly so! Turns out, explaining "why we fight" is very important and for all of Dubya's mishaps with Iraq he at least had the "decency" to do that
We've fallen so far, from patient, careful lying involving the construction of right-wing fantasy worlds by means of abundant forged evidence and hysterical claims, to ADHD lying involving just making up completely new crackbrain theories every other week.
Honestly, it's even worse than that. The nuttiest thing about the whole Iran debacle is the extent to which they never even really bothered explaining in a coherent way why we did it. It like they never had a meeting where all the principles got together and said "guys, people are going to ask why we started this war and what we hope to accomplish so maybe we should come up with some talking points we can all repeat to the press".
Mainly because there wasn't a coherent reason to enter the war.
The reason we went is because Donald Trump thought, without any evidence, more importantly despite all evidence, that he could "fix" something that had been bothering him for decades.
When the explanation is one man "just felt like it" there can be no explaining that. Because even his toadies sort of understand that's not really a reason. The closest they came was saying it would all work out because Trump was smarter than every other President ever, and I swear I believe they believe that.
That's what I assume because it's the only thing in the general ballpark of rational, but still kind of insane. If the Iranian regime did indeed collapse in the first week, it seems extremely unlikely that there would be an orderly transition to a new government. It would have probably been a civil war that may have actually been worse.
Add me to the list of people who think Trump and his inner circle would 100% declare "Mission Accomplished" and openly boast that it was the greatest feat of US arms since at least World War 2, if not the American Revolution itself, if Iran collapsed into civil war. Literally nothing that happened after that point would be considered to be a negative consequence of that event and a very large share of the bipartisan elite would go along with it being a desirable accomplishment.
I’m not sure about that. If the country is in a civil way and armed militias are closing the strait, then it seems worse. The strait is closed but there is nobody you can surrender to in order to get it back open. Not to mention that it could destabilize the entire region.
I think if Iran collapses as opposed to either the status quo or an orderly transition things would be worse even for Trump. A failing Iran is not going to be an Iran that peacefully allows free transit of Hormuz.
Not only did Bush spend months explaining and get authorization from congress, he also built support in the international order and went in there with a multinational coalition
But he also lied like crazy. That whole WMD special working group was designed to justify a war that was already decided on, irrespective of the actual intelligence result. Instead of clapping Bush on the back, I think we should recognize that Trump and the Bush administration are just exhibiting different flavors of the same bad judgement and mendacity. The difference is that Bush had a society and politics that put restraints on him, forcing him to lie. Trump (and the GOP) have so degraded our civil society that the lying just isn't necessary anymore.
And these things are not unrelated. The lying of the Bush people (and the institutional GOP, including Murdoch) was part of what built the world we're living in today. If we'd burned them to the ground, maybe Trump wouldn't be a thing. Instead we’re discussing how relatively respectful the first set of invading barbarians was compared to the most recent set, and ignoring the fact that the first invaders wiped out most of our defenses.
my understanding is that the actual intelligence community did think Iraq had WMD and that was in large part because Saddam wanted the world to think he had WMD.
I've seen very little credible evidence that Bush or his team lied about WMD, but yes they were clearly wrong
The bigger problem was the actual mistake once we took over, the disbanding we did was a huge mistake
then our unwillingness to put forth the surge needed early
I have a very specific memory of Colin Powell being sent to the UN to display images of aluminum tubes that the administration claimed were evidence of a nuclear program. The intelligence estimate completely disagreed with this, so the administration overrode it. The relationship with Al Queda was completely at odds with intelligence, and was essential to selling the war to a post-9/11 public. Anywhere there was a question or a probabilistic answer, the administration interpreted it maximally. They also created their own group within the Pentagon to bypass the intelligence agencies, which led to even stronger conclusions about WMDs that were totally wrong. By 2003 the IAEA actually had inspectors on the ground and negative results were coming back (correctly), but the administration had already committed forces, so they stopped the inspections and told the IAEA to leave. The rest is history.
Politically, the obvious thing to do is just subsidize groceries.
You would never want to cause widespread deflation, that's economic death and would trigger a recession. But you can bring down grocery prices without causing deflation generally, and grocery prices are what people see every day; that's why we keep hearing about them*.
I'm not saying this is necessarily good economics. (Though it beats government grocery stores.) But it would sure be a political win, it wouldn't cause significant harm, and it benefits working class people disproportionately since food is a bigger part of their budget. If the opposition tries to ding you for obvious pandering that doesn't touch the real drivers of inflation, you just fire back that they're out of touch (select based on party: "billionaires"/"Harvard professors") who think nothing of paying $10 for a glass of milk.
I'm kind of surprised Trump hasn't done this already. It seems super on brand.
*Gas is the other price people see every day, but gas is tied to international oil prices and it's much harder to bring the price down cleanly.
How can you universally subsidize groceries? If an egg costs $0.50 that's the price where the supply and demand for eggs meet. If you subsidize eggs to the tune of $0.10 then there is more demand than supply and you get an egg shortage.
Let's imagine the market clearing price, worldwide, is $0.50 per egg. The US government decides to subsidize egg prices until eggs cost $0.45. this increases egg consumption, so to ration eggs, the global price increases to $0.60 per egg and the government subsidy is $0.15 per egg.
So we have:
Americans pay: $0.45 per egg (and increase consumption)
US Gov pays: $0.15 per egg
Rest of World pays: $0.60 (and have to decrease consumption to make up for Americans increased consumption).
The subsidy's initial effect is that egg suppliers get $0.10 more per egg while consumers continue to pay $0.50. Suppliers now have ten cents of extra headroom to cut prices and grab market share, so they start doing that. Consumers buy more eggs, suppliers respond by ramping up production, and the new price settles somewhere between $0.40 and $0.50.
It's exactly the same dynamic that would happen if some new technology made it ten cents cheaper to produce an egg. Of course, in this case the "technology" is taxpayer dollars and we're just moving our collective money from one pocket to the other; but the highly salient grocery price goes down, the cost on the back end is largely invisible, and that's a politician's favorite kind of policy.
At the start of the exercise, before subsidies, the market clearing price is $0.50. That means (assuming a highly competitive, commoditized market, which food mostly is) that it costs very close to $0.50 to produce an egg. As an egg producer, you can't go lower because you have to cover your costs, and you can't go higher because you'll lose all your business to cheaper competitors.
Now the subsidy begins. The government comes and says to egg producers, "We will give you $0.10 for every egg you produce, over and above whatever you get from the buyer."
At this point, egg producers are now making $0.60 per egg -- $0.50 from the buyer and $0.10 from Uncle Sam. Ten cents of extra profit per egg is great! But now Joe at Joe's Egg Farm thinks, "What if I cut my sale price to $0.48? With the extra $0.10, I still clear eight cents more than before, and since my eggs are now two cents cheaper than everyone else's, I'll gain market share. I can buy more hens and grow my business."
Rinse and repeat. Egg producers compete away the gains from the subsidy until supply and demand balance again at some new price point, which may or may not be as low as $0.40 but is certainly less than $0.50.
It's a good idea on paper but would obviously be thrown in the trash can when Trump's advisors pointed out to him that he couldn't limit the subsidized grocery prices to just the Trump-voting areas.
"Politically, the obvious thing to do is just subsidize groceries."
We already do this to an incredible amount and Congress has added an additional $23 billion in farm subsidies this year to the normal amount. But we also push costs higher, most egregiously with the ethanol requirement.
>put out information promoting the consumption of “v-meats”<
Don’t laugh off the appeal of V-meats. I think the GOP should seriously consider using this in its political communication, except calling it T (Trump) meats. Trump, after all, does possess considerable expertise in meat retailing.
As someone who pretty much never goes out to eat or gets delivery, I was very much Tweeting like Crenshaw during the Biden area.
At the same time, there is something really visceral about grocery prices, and yes, I felt the same way under Biden. I can’t get over paying more than TWO DOLLARS for one apple. Yes, I could buy cheaper apples etc, but I like cosmic crisp, and that’s what the closest grocery store charges. I can’t get over how a salary that would have been considered posh ten years ago now isn’t enough to get by on. And yes, I know grocery prices drastically falling would be massively deflationary and an economic crisis. But none of that changes my outrage that ONE APPLE costs more than TWO DOLLARS!
This isn’t a solvable problem, even though Trump is making it worse. The “affordability crisis” can only be overcome by broad economic growth and people eventually forgetting that apples used to cost less than TWO DOLLARS! That’s not going to happen before 2028, but hopefully we get a Democratic president, and it happens by 2030
Is there ever a case where people don’t just rebrand the policies they already believe in as though they will help affordability though? Trump is not gonna suddenly advocate for taxes on rich people, a balanced budget, and free trade.
TCJA lowered everyone's taxes by about the same number of percentage points. Stop with this regressive tax cuts nonsense. The system is highly progressive. Biden and Obama's unwillingness to touch taxes on 99+% of Americans just as problematic as Trump's policies. We have a revenue problem, not a progressivity problem. Come on Matt, you're better than this.
The injustice of New Yorkers *only* facing a 57% all-in top marginal rate. SMH
I get that a lot on the right on indifferent to the poor but I would suggest a healthy portion do - they just have significantly different ideas about to help them. I think reducing it to that probably isn’t gonna be the most helpful.
you defended Platner. Sit down.
Sir, this is an Arby's.
More affordable than Chipotle's, I will admit!
Not these days
??? From a quick Google search, it looks all of Arby's baseline sandwiches (not meals) are cheaper than any Chipotle baseline burritos.
I'm thinking of satiation, although that is subjective. One Chipotle burrito can usually last me about a meal and a half.
Burritos have rice beans and the tortilla. thats 3 carbs, before anything else.
We could have had Taco trucks on every corner.
‘We Have Burrito at Home’
Hell of a thing to run on!
I do think the Walsh/Crenshaw/etc comments tend to illustrate how little of Republican policymaking operates at the model level, and basically tends to flow from moral-intuitional rules.
And that’s why it’s so important that people consider welfare to be immoral.
https://nicholasdecker.substack.com/p/the-median-voter-is-a-maoist
Yes totally - an extremely good point.
The spike in online ordering of food is a sign of/caused by the loneliness crisis, right?
Could Jesus create a burrito so expensive that he himself could not afford it?
City of Trees, how are you passing up all these mentions of tripe to post a link?? Is everything ok?
I did a quick unscientific AI comparison of Chipotle burrito prices compared with BLS median full time worker earnings over time, and it seems like a chicken Chipotle burrito (with no add-ons and before tax/tip) has stayed costing between 18 to 22 minutes of median wage labor for at least 20 years. It’s overall been pretty stable.
Chipotle burrito quality has declined though
By what metric?
They used to be larger and less restrictive on the quantity of meat.
it depends when you go. I find it’s still good at lunchtime, but anytime after 8:00 pm is bad
Median wage has increased by about 38% since 2019 (largely because lower-end wages have increased post-COVID). Chipotle chicken burritos have increased by about 35%. This seems to be about parity, but: how many Americans have had a 38% increase in their actual take-home pay in that time? I bet it's lower than you think. Social security retirement benefits have only gone up 28.8% and those are supposed to be indexed to COLA. (And we're just ignoring the elephant in the room, i.e., the huge cost increase in beef, which has increased much more than chicken.)
CPI is massaged to make it appear like inflation goes up less than it actually does.
for example they deflate inflation based on technological progress. new iPhone comes out but costs the same, lower CPI
It’s not done to make anything look different than it actually is. There are different indices that are meant to convey different information and answer different questions. It’s all transparent, and if your business or personal well being depends on knowing different aspects of price fluctuations the data is available.
Most people just use CPI
And all types of stuff tends to tied to it including raises for many people
So a 55" TV is $500 and a 65" is $750 and next year a 65" TV is $500 then that's zero inflation not significant deflation?
it's a coherent argument, but how often do you buy a tv or new electronic gadget? Once all the rooms you want to have tv's have tv's, you don't need any more for a long time. This year our household has bought: 1 bluetooth speaker and one new water fountain for the kitties. I'm glad they were affordable for us, but those kinds of semi-durable goods getting cheaper don't matter as much as other things like housing, consumables, and services getting much more expensive.
Housing - ok you're 18 years into the mortgage you took out on 2009 - calculate inflation. It sure seems like people are assuming everyone is buying a new house every year.
Sure, and the price of making home repairs has risen way faster than inflation
No that would actually be deflation is the price for that product actually went down.
But we should stop using normal technological progress to hide real inflation
where you really get into trouble with this of course is the composite index. The fact that tech got better and TV's are better is used to offset actual price increases in food, housing, medical etc
So people look around and say yeah, my TV's better but I can't afford to pay more rent or put food on the table...
If you're someone for whom paying for Chipotle burrito is actually a reasonably high cost vis a vis your income, than there is a good chance you actually saw a reasonably significant increase in your wages from 2021 to 2024 given wage increases were concentrated at the lower half of the income scale. In addition, you very likely eligible for a) all the various stimulus checks b) enhanced unemployment. Given America has 331 million people, I'm sure there are people out there of limited means who a) for whatever reason didn't benefit all that much from Covid financial measures b) are working for the same exact wage they did in 2019. But in general, based on data, on solid ground to say majority of people on the lower income scale really did have materially more money in their pockets today than in 2019 even of unfortunately a lot of that increased financial benefit has been eroded by inflation.
Sure, but one of the main driver of the vibes is reasonably affluent people being annoyed by higher prices, not experiencing actual privation.
I don’t know. I think a lot of middle class people really are struggling. You had a class of people who were saving 0-10% of their paycheck each cycle, and now everything (rent, groceries, electricity, streaming) is way up. Salaries may be up too, but it takes only a little bit of mismatch to wipe out that cushion.
Take a worked example. Someone who made $60,000 in 2019 and saved $6,000 “should” now be making $82,800 if their salary kept up with median wage. That would net them $8280 per year assuming all prices rose at the same rate. But say their salary only rose 29% during that time: now they’re making $77,400 and their savings cushion is now only $2,880 per year. At 24% or so, your cushion evaporates. Or say your rent went up more than burrito prices: now you’re really just screwed. It’s very easy for people to get wiped out and not be “the rich”.
"We really shouldn't feel bad for Trump" ever for anything he has done. I for one will be dancing for joy when he dies.
If he's still president at the time?
Whether he is or not.
Dancing, but with trepidation for what comes next. But still dancing.
Intellectually, Dan Crenshaw and Marc are right, the problem is that people REALLY like ordering takeout even when they really shouldn't be doing so AND these price spikes are second-order impacts of a war nobody asked for! Imagine if FDR launched WW2 pre-Pearl Harbor on a party-line basis with no explanation, no justification, he'd be ripped to shreds by the media of his time and correctly so! Turns out, explaining "why we fight" is very important and for all of Dubya's mishaps with Iraq he at least had the "decency" to do that
We've fallen so far, from patient, careful lying involving the construction of right-wing fantasy worlds by means of abundant forged evidence and hysterical claims, to ADHD lying involving just making up completely new crackbrain theories every other week.
Politicians used to give a shit about whether the deception is plausible! "Hypocrisy is the tithe vice pays to virtue" and all that jazz
Honestly, it's even worse than that. The nuttiest thing about the whole Iran debacle is the extent to which they never even really bothered explaining in a coherent way why we did it. It like they never had a meeting where all the principles got together and said "guys, people are going to ask why we started this war and what we hope to accomplish so maybe we should come up with some talking points we can all repeat to the press".
Mainly because there wasn't a coherent reason to enter the war.
The reason we went is because Donald Trump thought, without any evidence, more importantly despite all evidence, that he could "fix" something that had been bothering him for decades.
When the explanation is one man "just felt like it" there can be no explaining that. Because even his toadies sort of understand that's not really a reason. The closest they came was saying it would all work out because Trump was smarter than every other President ever, and I swear I believe they believe that.
If the Iranian regime had collapsed in the first week, per their hopes/"plans," then they wouldn't have had to explain anything.
They didn't allow themselves to ponder "and if that doesn't happen, then what?"
Trump getting into the Iran quagmire is his sincerest form of adulation of Putin. If Putin can call for a one week war then by jiminy so can Donald.
That's what I assume because it's the only thing in the general ballpark of rational, but still kind of insane. If the Iranian regime did indeed collapse in the first week, it seems extremely unlikely that there would be an orderly transition to a new government. It would have probably been a civil war that may have actually been worse.
Add me to the list of people who think Trump and his inner circle would 100% declare "Mission Accomplished" and openly boast that it was the greatest feat of US arms since at least World War 2, if not the American Revolution itself, if Iran collapsed into civil war. Literally nothing that happened after that point would be considered to be a negative consequence of that event and a very large share of the bipartisan elite would go along with it being a desirable accomplishment.
Not worse for Trump.
I’m not sure about that. If the country is in a civil way and armed militias are closing the strait, then it seems worse. The strait is closed but there is nobody you can surrender to in order to get it back open. Not to mention that it could destabilize the entire region.
I think if Iran collapses as opposed to either the status quo or an orderly transition things would be worse even for Trump. A failing Iran is not going to be an Iran that peacefully allows free transit of Hormuz.
Iran descending into civil war means Trump can waddle away and declare victory.
Not only did Bush spend months explaining and get authorization from congress, he also built support in the international order and went in there with a multinational coalition
But he also lied like crazy. That whole WMD special working group was designed to justify a war that was already decided on, irrespective of the actual intelligence result. Instead of clapping Bush on the back, I think we should recognize that Trump and the Bush administration are just exhibiting different flavors of the same bad judgement and mendacity. The difference is that Bush had a society and politics that put restraints on him, forcing him to lie. Trump (and the GOP) have so degraded our civil society that the lying just isn't necessary anymore.
And these things are not unrelated. The lying of the Bush people (and the institutional GOP, including Murdoch) was part of what built the world we're living in today. If we'd burned them to the ground, maybe Trump wouldn't be a thing. Instead we’re discussing how relatively respectful the first set of invading barbarians was compared to the most recent set, and ignoring the fact that the first invaders wiped out most of our defenses.
my understanding is that the actual intelligence community did think Iraq had WMD and that was in large part because Saddam wanted the world to think he had WMD.
I've seen very little credible evidence that Bush or his team lied about WMD, but yes they were clearly wrong
The bigger problem was the actual mistake once we took over, the disbanding we did was a huge mistake
then our unwillingness to put forth the surge needed early
Bush's sin was motivational thinking and deluded hopium over nation building as opposed to outright lies.
I have a very specific memory of Colin Powell being sent to the UN to display images of aluminum tubes that the administration claimed were evidence of a nuclear program. The intelligence estimate completely disagreed with this, so the administration overrode it. The relationship with Al Queda was completely at odds with intelligence, and was essential to selling the war to a post-9/11 public. Anywhere there was a question or a probabilistic answer, the administration interpreted it maximally. They also created their own group within the Pentagon to bypass the intelligence agencies, which led to even stronger conclusions about WMDs that were totally wrong. By 2003 the IAEA actually had inspectors on the ground and negative results were coming back (correctly), but the administration had already committed forces, so they stopped the inspections and told the IAEA to leave. The rest is history.
Politically, the obvious thing to do is just subsidize groceries.
You would never want to cause widespread deflation, that's economic death and would trigger a recession. But you can bring down grocery prices without causing deflation generally, and grocery prices are what people see every day; that's why we keep hearing about them*.
I'm not saying this is necessarily good economics. (Though it beats government grocery stores.) But it would sure be a political win, it wouldn't cause significant harm, and it benefits working class people disproportionately since food is a bigger part of their budget. If the opposition tries to ding you for obvious pandering that doesn't touch the real drivers of inflation, you just fire back that they're out of touch (select based on party: "billionaires"/"Harvard professors") who think nothing of paying $10 for a glass of milk.
I'm kind of surprised Trump hasn't done this already. It seems super on brand.
*Gas is the other price people see every day, but gas is tied to international oil prices and it's much harder to bring the price down cleanly.
How can you universally subsidize groceries? If an egg costs $0.50 that's the price where the supply and demand for eggs meet. If you subsidize eggs to the tune of $0.10 then there is more demand than supply and you get an egg shortage.
We can import eggs from elsewhere.
Let's imagine the market clearing price, worldwide, is $0.50 per egg. The US government decides to subsidize egg prices until eggs cost $0.45. this increases egg consumption, so to ration eggs, the global price increases to $0.60 per egg and the government subsidy is $0.15 per egg.
So we have:
Americans pay: $0.45 per egg (and increase consumption)
US Gov pays: $0.15 per egg
Rest of World pays: $0.60 (and have to decrease consumption to make up for Americans increased consumption).
You're describing price controls, not subsidies.
The subsidy's initial effect is that egg suppliers get $0.10 more per egg while consumers continue to pay $0.50. Suppliers now have ten cents of extra headroom to cut prices and grab market share, so they start doing that. Consumers buy more eggs, suppliers respond by ramping up production, and the new price settles somewhere between $0.40 and $0.50.
It's exactly the same dynamic that would happen if some new technology made it ten cents cheaper to produce an egg. Of course, in this case the "technology" is taxpayer dollars and we're just moving our collective money from one pocket to the other; but the highly salient grocery price goes down, the cost on the back end is largely invisible, and that's a politician's favorite kind of policy.
"Suppliers now have ten cents of extra headroom to cut prices..."
Do tell - they cut prices when the problem is too few eggs? They were already ramping egg production as fast as possible after the bird flu cull.
I don't even know what you're talking about now.
At the start of the exercise, before subsidies, the market clearing price is $0.50. That means (assuming a highly competitive, commoditized market, which food mostly is) that it costs very close to $0.50 to produce an egg. As an egg producer, you can't go lower because you have to cover your costs, and you can't go higher because you'll lose all your business to cheaper competitors.
Now the subsidy begins. The government comes and says to egg producers, "We will give you $0.10 for every egg you produce, over and above whatever you get from the buyer."
At this point, egg producers are now making $0.60 per egg -- $0.50 from the buyer and $0.10 from Uncle Sam. Ten cents of extra profit per egg is great! But now Joe at Joe's Egg Farm thinks, "What if I cut my sale price to $0.48? With the extra $0.10, I still clear eight cents more than before, and since my eggs are now two cents cheaper than everyone else's, I'll gain market share. I can buy more hens and grow my business."
Rinse and repeat. Egg producers compete away the gains from the subsidy until supply and demand balance again at some new price point, which may or may not be as low as $0.40 but is certainly less than $0.50.
That's not how it works. You're missing the entire problem which is not enough eggs.
You're missing the solution, which is that producers get more hens and produce more eggs.
The price elasticity of supply for groceries is not zero.
You get an egg shortage? Then you ration eggs. Once the government starts messing in a market, there's no end to it.
https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/styles/pubs_2x/public/2025-12/4xb09cuixxqa1.jpg?itok=KFJStz6h
I mean, the way you’d do it is by increasing SNAP funding, and yes, prices would rise
It's a good idea on paper but would obviously be thrown in the trash can when Trump's advisors pointed out to him that he couldn't limit the subsidized grocery prices to just the Trump-voting areas.
"Politically, the obvious thing to do is just subsidize groceries."
We already do this to an incredible amount and Congress has added an additional $23 billion in farm subsidies this year to the normal amount. But we also push costs higher, most egregiously with the ethanol requirement.
Great shout re ethanol subsidies making groceries more expensive. We wrote about that back in May: https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-dumb-policy-making-groceries
please don't give him anymore ideas, the last thing America needs is MORE Peronism
Good thing Trump can’t read.
>put out information promoting the consumption of “v-meats”<
Don’t laugh off the appeal of V-meats. I think the GOP should seriously consider using this in its political communication, except calling it T (Trump) meats. Trump, after all, does possess considerable expertise in meat retailing.
Yes, they could advertise how good tripe is. Trump Tripe. Rolls off the tongue.