The $20 Burrito That Blew Up The Right | Weds LIVE Ep. 50

A college student complained he couldn't afford a $20 burrito. A senior producer replied that his wife feeds a family of eight homemade burritos for less than that. Twelve million views later, the American right was at war with itself over whether the affordability crisis is real — and whether anyone on the right is allowed to say so out loud.

On this Wednesday Live panel, Jeremy Boreing sits down with the three men who got the facts right and still watched the room turn on them. Joel Berry — Marine Corps veteran, former managing editor of The Babylon Bee, author of the bestselling The Postmodern Pilgrim's Progress, and senior producer of this show — wrote the post that started it. David Harsanyi, founding editor of The Federalist and senior writer at the Washington Examiner, has spent the week making the data case that food inflation has returned to something close to its historical norm. Daniel Di Martino, Venezuelan-born economist, Manhattan Institute fellow, and founder of the Dissident Project, watched socialism destroy what was once the fourth-richest country in the world — and argues the American shortage was built by government and can be unbuilt by it.

The numbers set up the problem. The July inflation report released this morning put headline CPI at 3.4 percent annually and core at 2.5 percent, both down slightly from June. Food inflation over the last two years has run near 3 percent a year. The acute spike that began in 2021 and crested in 2022 is over. And yet a July Washington Post poll of nearly 2,700 adults found 65 percent of Americans calling grocery prices unaffordable — including 56 percent of households earning more than $100,000 a year.

Why the gap? Because the rate of increase came back down and the prices never did. Grocery prices are up roughly 30 percent since the pandemic. A twenty-two-year-old who paid seven-fifty for a Chipotle burrito in high school now pays eleven-sixty. That is a complaint about the price level, not the rate of change — and as Cato's Ryan Bourne argues, telling people to cook cheaper substitutes may be the political equivalent of Jimmy Carter telling Americans to put on a sweater.

This hour is the argument the right has been avoiding: how to say a true thing without insulting the person who needs to hear it. The panel works through the dispersion hiding under the headline numbers, the four categories where the real pain lives — housing, healthcare, tuition, childcare — and the policy levers that actually move prices. Di Martino makes the housing supply case in plain English: zoning, parking mandates, permitting. He also says on the record that lifting tariffs is the fastest available lever on goods prices, which puts him crosswise with the current administration. Harsanyi defends the historical context: food's share of the family budget has fallen from roughly 42 percent in 1901 to under 10 percent today. Berry connects affordability to family formation, marriage, and birth rates — and to why economic populism captured a large share of the party instead of the case for cutting spending, taxes, regulation, and entitlements.

Then there are the stakes. Zohran Mamdani won New York City on a cost-of-living platform, and DSA candidates are gaining ground elsewhere on the same pitch. His argument was never that the right is cruel. It was that nothing has been tried. Did the right hand him that? And is it about to hand somebody else the midterms?

The hour closes on the hardest version of the question. A family of eight can eat well on twenty dollars if somebody is home to cook. What is the answer in a household where nobody is — two working parents, no time, no margin? Each guest names the one thing he would remove rather than add to make American life cheaper.

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