In a bit of X discourse so dumb that it culminated in the vice president fat-shaming a newspaper columnist, the right-wing commentariat has spent the last 48 hours arguing over whether burritos are too expensive. Matt Walsh of the Daily Wire began the dialogue by blaming “insane” grocery prices on “stupid foreign wars,” followed by Turning Point’s Andrew Kolvet claiming a college student lamented that “a burrito shouldn’t cost $20.” Marc Thiessen, the aforementioned Washington Post columnist, noted that college students have access to cafeteria food, concluding with JD Vance commenting that Thiessen “has never missed a burrito.”
End scene.
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Everyone except for the vice president here has a point: As Walsh noted, price stability indeed “should be the number one priority of every elected leader,” and as Kolvet pointed out, that prices are elevated is “a hangover from Covid and Biden-era inflation.” Similarly, Thiessen is correct that broke college students — which all of us former college students once were, by definition, as 18-year-olds with little value yet in the labor market — should rely predominantly on cooking or the cafeteria included in room and board instead of dining out at restaurants. But they’re all missing the forest for the trees. The fact is that the dismal consumer sentiment that has persisted throughout President Donald Trump’s second term is not because of burrito prices or even “inflation,” by the technical definition of the term. Rather, everyone is mad that price levels don’t go back down again, and as far as those prices go, they’re specifically livid over service prices. And, overwhelmingly, voter concerns about affordability remain dominated by housing, not any other arena of consumer goods.
As plenty of dissenters correctly pointed out, the raw cost of making burritos for a family of four at home costs the same $20 the unnamed college student claims a single burrito costs at a restaurant. The math does roughly check out: According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the national average for a pound of ground beef is about $6.83, a full pound of rice is $1.09, a pound of beans is $1.63, and a pound of cheddar cheese is $5.96. We don’t have BLS data for the rest of the ingredients that you may prefer in your burrito, but in the Washington, D.C., area, a pack of tortillas is about $3, a half-pint of sour cream is less than $2, and an avocado at Walmart runs you $0.87.
The premium that drives up the price of that $5 burrito you made at home to $20 in a restaurant is largely the cost of labor, which has been inflated by government regulations, including aggressively reckless minimum wage hikes by states and localities, as well as the historically tight nature of today’s labor market.
More important than the nominal price of a burrito, either at home or in a restaurant, is how consumer wages have changed relative to that cost. For example, nominal wages have risen about 32% since February 2020. The nominal price of beans rose 30% in that time and cheddar only 10%, meaning that in real terms, those items have actually gotten cheaper. But the price of rice has risen by 48% and ground beef has more than doubled, meaning those items have gotten more expensive.
Rather than compare, item by item, how prices have changed relative to earnings, the best way to understand affordability is to compare real average weekly earnings, which compares nominal wage changes with the overall increase in the consumer price index. Real average weekly earnings fell nearly 4% throughout Joe Biden’s presidency because even though nominal wages rose about 20%, the overall CPI rose 22% in those four years. By contrast, since the start of Trump’s second term, nominal wage growth (5.5%) has outpaced the increase in CPI (4.4%). Real average weekly earnings under Trump had increased by a very impressive 1.9%, but after the supply shocks of the Iran war and the tariffs, the total real average weekly wage increase since January 2025 is now 1.3%.
In real terms, the economy has become more affordable, on average, throughout Trump’s term. But no president can do that by outright lowering prices absent a cataclysmic depression. Rather, Trump (correctly) wants enough economic growth that wage growth beats the CPI increase.
Furthermore, voter qualms about affordability aren’t about burritos. They’re about service prices and housing. Since March 2020, overall CPI inflation has averaged nearly 4%, almost double the Federal Reserve’s maximum inflation target of 2%. Nearly half of that inflation is due to shelter prices, while a quarter is due to services, excluding those that pertain to food, energy, or shelter services. Meanwhile, core goods contributed just 13% of that inflation, and food just 16%. This is why I have written over and over and over again that really the affordability crisis is about housing, so really this burrito thing is a distraction. But to the extent that the public cares about burrito prices, they really care about service prices.
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For what it’s worth, outsourcing the time and labor to handcraft specialized cuisines from scratch has never been considered anything less than a luxury. And if you want to make that luxury more affordable, you have to focus on depressing wages, not the raw input costs. After all, since Trump took office, the average price of food at home has only increased 3.2%, or in line with the Fed’s inflation target. By contrast, food away from home prices have risen nearly twice as fast.
The expensive burrito conundrum is why it’s horrifying to see a faction of Republicans adopt the same illogical obsession with wage-oriented economic policy as Democrats, while both pretend to be concerned about affordability. The public intuitively understands that supply-side economics render everyone better off; in a poll by Navigator Research, 70% of voters, including 72% of self-described MAGA Republicans, prefer that the government focus on lowering costs rather than raising nominal wages. If you want a cheaper burrito, eliminate the minimum wage, dismantle the unions, slash payroll taxes and regulations, and adopt productivity-improving artificial intelligence as quickly as possible. Otherwise, make it yourself.
