Skipping breakfast to reduce inflation? No, the elites: it’s the feds who must follow a diet

The Wall Street Journal recently published a thinly veiled harangue titled “To Save Money, You Maybe Should Skip Breakfast.” Brimming with elitism, he not only claims to lecture Americans, but he also falsely blames today’s high prices on everything from the weather to the war in Ukraine, instead of attack the root cause: public spending.

Perhaps because the Journal misdiagnosed the cause of high food prices, it also recommended the wrong treatment. The condescending suggestion to simply skip a meal is the kind of nonchalance that comes from those unaffected by the economic problems of the common man.

One can imagine the ruling elites looking down and saying, “You are stupid proletarians. Solving your cost of living crisis is so simple: just cut your calories by a third.

The higher price of breakfast foods is particularly troubling for low- and middle-income people who previously relied on consumer staples like eggs as a very inexpensive source of protein and vitamin D. Unfortunately, a dozen eggs cost 72% more today than before. three years ago.

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With food prices skyrocketing, it’s no wonder families are going into debt on their credit cards just to buy groceries.

While it is true that some specific food prices have increased recently due to world events, weather, or other temporary issues, food prices in general have increased dramatically.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, they have increased by an average of 21%, and many consumer staples, like eggs, have increased much more than that.

Food prices in general are relatively volatile, and some are very seasonal, so much so that they are excluded from so-called “core inflation” measures. However, food prices have not suddenly exploded over the past month. On the contrary, they have been increasing for three years.

If recent random events around the world aren’t the cause of rising food prices, then what are? In short, government spending.

If the Biden administration and big spenders in Congress – from both political parties – had simply let one-time COVID-related emergency spending expire, the federal government would have a balanced budget today. Instead, they replaced those trillions of dollars with unnecessary new spending, cementing multi-trillion dollar deficits.

Much of these deficits were financed by the Federal Reserve, simply creating money. By increasing the quantity of money without a corresponding increase in the size of the economy, the value of money has decreased. That’s inflation.

President Biden himself even mentioned this phenomenon once during a speech in Baltimore. He rightly explained that when the government shut down the economy and reduced economic activity while creating money and distributing it to people, prices increased.

There is no doubt that disruptions such as bird flu, which killed many chickens, caused the price of eggs to temporarily rise. But even after the chicken supply resumed, egg prices never returned to where they were three years ago. That’s because the dollar doesn’t go as far as it used to.

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One of the functions of money is a measuring tool that allows you to compare several different things at once based on price. But inflation reduces this measuring tool, so more units are needed to measure the same thing.

For example, if a yardstick was reduced to just 30 inches, you would need 20% more to measure from one end zone to another on a football field. The field has not expanded, but the scale has reduced.

By spending billions of dollars it didn’t have, the government created the highest inflation in 40 years and a cost-of-living crisis that disproportionately affected low- and middle-income earners.

Because elites have escaped this scourge largely unscathed, they can issue recommendations that are wildly out of touch with reality, like cutting out a third of your food consumption. Any economic situation, inflation or otherwise, which produces such a disconnect between social classes has a destabilizing effect on a country.

All the more reason to reduce inflation and public spending. It’s much better than skipping breakfast.