MOREFIELD: Burritogate, Affordability, And The Elephant That Con Inc. Refuses To Name

The difference between the populist & libertarian right and the rest of the right (the part many of us endearingly call ‘Con Inc.’) has arguably never been as clear as it was during last week’s protracted argument about what a burrito should cost.

Read more The Definitive Guide To Burrito Inflation

If you missed it somehow, just type “$20 burrito” into your X search bar, and you’ll get caught up pretty quickly. I’m not going to do a blow-by-blow rehash of the whole thing here except to say that I fall firmly on the side of the debate that argues that a decent, edible burrito that won’t explode your heart shouldn’t cost $20, even with sales tax. I do, however, have a few things to say about the affordability issue writ large, particularly the elephant in the room most ‘conservatives’ conveniently ignore.

To set the table, there’s no denying that young people are suffering under the current economic landscape. Just 24 years ago, my wife and I got married in our 20s and immediately bought a 3-bedroom, 1-bath house for a grand total of $67,500. We put nothing down (we did have good credit), and I think our mortgage was around $600/month. She was a Christian school teacher earning around $18,000/year, and I had an entry-level job in the recruiting/staffing industry that paid in the low- to mid-$20s. We live in East Tennessee, so those numbers might sound low to you even for then, but that was our situation.

Things were tight, but we made it work. We made some improvements over the years and sold that home eight and a half years later for over $100,000, took that equity into the next home, and so on. We aren’t rich by any means, but we now are in a solid equity position in our fourth home. We also benefited from the Covid-era equity bump that almost every homeowner experienced thanks to our government printing trillions out of thin air to convince people to close their businesses and stay home to avoid a head cold.

Our four children, on the other hand, have no such advantage, nor does anyone else in their generation, unless their parents are literally rich enough to hand them a ginormous lump of cash to put down on a house.

According to Grok’s inflation analysis, that $67,500 would be $125,300 today, and our combined income of around $40,000 then would be around $75,000 today, slightly above East Tennessee’s current median household income of $68,818. Except imagine trying to buy a house for $125K that isn’t a dilapidated, rat-infested crack house in the hood with a collapsed porch and busted-out windows. You can’t, and that’s a huge problem.

Any decent starter home these days, even a townhouse, will cost at least $200-$300K. And thanks to the tighter lending standards brought on by the 2008 financial crisis, buyers better have a hefty down payment to go along with that top-notch credit. Which has left an entire generation of young people on the outside looking in at the American Dream that existed for hundreds of years but now, seemingly, no longer exists for them.

So yeah, it’s a problem; everyone agrees it’s a problem, and the hope is that the political movement on the right that addresses it best will actually win against the Democratic Socialist insanity that is currently using this crisis to trick giant swaths of young people into believing that the answer is essentially waving a magic wand Harry Potter-style and ordering prices to come down.

Fast forward to Burritogate, and you have the various factions on the right, admittedly the only sides that get anywhere close to real solutions, fighting over what exactly those solutions should be. Con Inc.’s advice to young people, delivered by the likes of The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro, The Babylon Bee’s Joel Berry, Texas Republican Rep. Dan Crenshaw and others, is generally summed up by what your Boomercon father or grandfather would probably tell you. Some version of: “Quit whining, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, tighten your belt, work hard, and deal with it. But mostly, quit whining. What are you, some kind of Communist?”

Read more ‘DSA Is Our MAGA’: The Democratic Establishment Faces A Reckoning

To be fair, that’s all generally true to some extent. It’s certainly a good idea for everyone, not just young people, to work hard and live within your means. But is that enough? I know my wife, and I could never have afforded a home back in 2002 if the economic ratios were what they are now. We would have been renting for years or, worse, begging one of our parents to let us live in their basement.

And it’s not just housing prices that are up; it’s energy, healthcare, food, transportation, and almost everything else. Combine that with the threat of AI removing countless jobs from the playing field, and you have a recipe for the kind of social strife the world hasn’t seen since the early 20th century. It certainly shouldn’t be surprising that an entire generation is turning in droves to the false promise of socialism.

To be fair, it’s not like Shapiro & Co. don’t acknowledge the problem and offer solutions, and criticize the government for getting us into this situation in the first place. Things like deregulation, changes in fiscal policy, and easing pressure on demand by deporting illegals all would certainly help.

But they also conveniently ignore the elephant in the room, the elephant that the Democratic Socialists have zero qualms about shouting from the rooftops: the war with Iran and the United States’ seemingly unconditional support for Israel, which over the years has arguably led to all sorts of expensive entanglements in the Middle East.

Responding to a question/observation about the topic from Kentucky Republican Rep. Thomas Massie, Grok noted that Americans have spent an extra $79 billion on fuel since the beginning of the war, or around $600 per household, and the Hormuz disruptions have significantly raised fertilizer costs for farmers.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Before this war, fuel prices were coming down significantly under Biden, and that was beginning to bring other sectors down with it. President Trump was actually fulfilling his economic promises, and Republicans had some strong economic headwinds heading into the midterms. Now, all that is gone, and pro-war Republicans are loath to admit the reason for fear of being called naughty names.

We should certainly discuss every possible solution to the affordability crisis, because Americans need help, but those discussions should include a sharp critique of American military budgets and expensive interventions in the Middle East at the behest of a foreign power. Thankfully, figures on the right like Tucker Carlson, Thomas Massie, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Megyn Kelly, Dave Smith, Tom Woods, and many others are filling the gap that Con Inc. refuses to fill.

Far from being pariahs in the future, they and their allies will be the only credible intellectual and political alternative to the Democratic Socialists.

Read more Scientists Raise Safety Concerns After AI Used To Design New Viruses