One weird trick to solve the affordability crisis
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Americans have a knack for turning the price of food into national theatre. In 1916 housewives boycotted “egg speculators" for daring to charge 36.5 cents a dozen.
Three decades later President Harry Truman urged America to observe Meatless Tuesdays and Eggless Thursdays, earning backlash when the White House itself had to forgo pumpkin pie on Thanksgiving. By the early 1970s, with eggs pushing 80 cents a dozen and beef edging past a dollar a pound, suburban mothers marched under banners like “Save Our Sanity" and “Boycott All Meat". One Utahn vowed to start trapping starlings before paying supermarket prices; a New Yorker resigned herself to “more tuna-fish casserole".
President Richard Nixon tried to quell the revolt with price freezes on beef, pork and lamb. Shelves emptied, inflation eventually surged. Today TikTok videos lamenting $13 Five Guys burgers, $12 Chipotle burritos and $5-a-dozen eggs fit into the tradition.
And politicians have responded in kind. President Donald Trump has proposed $2,000 stimulus cheques supposedly funded by tariff revenue, fighting inflation by repeating what prompted it in the first place. He has also floated a 50-year mortgage so homeowners can pay off their pandemic-era house well into retirement.
Democrats sound little different. “Affordability" has become their catch-all slogan, spawning calls for rent freezes, public grocery stores and other schemes designed to placate the indignant shopper. All of which makes the following fact awkward: the numbers are not nearly as frightening as the politics suggest.
True, beef and egg prices are a little hot. But overall price growth in America is unremarkable by historical standards. Annual grocery
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