Turning Point USA’s Andrew Kolvet got people talking with an early August tweet in which he relates a student activist’s take on the “affordability” issue. “A burrito,” the student told him, “shouldn’t cost $20.”

On the putative political “right,” responses range between two endpoints.

At one end, various “burrito index” projects demonstrate that it’s difficult, if not impossible, to find a $20 burrito in America unless it’s delivered or from a  restaurant with a big-name chef that charges $200 a plate for things cooked with weird “reductions” and served covered in even weirder “aolis,” if you can even get a reservation without first showing your Oscar trophy or mega-millions net worth to establish cred.

At the other end, soon-to-be-former Texas congressman Dan Crenshaw’s “stop whining, get a job, eat Ramen like the rest of us did in college, on a budget with 4 roommates” tweet.

Before going further down the $20 burrito rabbit hole, I think it’s important to let Kolvet rescue himself from the notion that he’s a $20 burrito complaint radical himself.  He ratchets the situation down to the more obvious real problem:

“Yeah, a lot of this is a hangover from Covid and Biden-era inflation,” he writes, because of course a Republican will always shift as much blame as possible to a Democrat, “but the lived experience is the same: It just feels like basic things cost too much.”

Fact check: Yes, that’s true.

I did a little “burrito index” type checking in my own neck of the woods, and the most expensive burrito I could find cost $16.95.

The “El Dueno,” on offer at my favorite local Tex-Mex place, Los Avina in Archer, Florida, is “stuffed with steak strips, topped with white cheese dip, sautéed onions, bell peppers, grilled chicken and shrimp,” and is served with a side of rice (all diners get “bottomless” chips and salsa there, too). With a drink, call it $20 plus tip for a full meal, of which the incredibly robust burrito is only part.

So yeah, the “$20 burrito” complaint is wildly overblown.

But back to “the lived experience.” Yes, things cost more than they used to. That’s always the case, but it’s been MORE the case over the last few years. While there are various reasons for that, the biggest one is taxes, and the most pernicious, if not always the largest annual, tax is inflation.

People tend to think of inflation as just another word for “price increases,” and mainstream media use of the word encourages that.

But, as the late economist Milton Friedman explained, “inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.”

To unpack that a little: Inflation occurs when there’s more “money” chasing after the same amount of goods, and that’s caused when “money” is created by a central authority (the Federal Reserve) which can just magically create more any time its partner (the US government) wants to borrow  a bunch.

In theory, the Fed tries to keep inflation at an annual rate of about 2%. In 2026, it’s running at about 3.5%, after hitting a high of 8% in 2022.

When a restaurant’s costs — ingredients, rent, electricity, labor, etc. — go up by 2% or 8%, its prices are going to go up as well. The restaurateur isn’t going to lose money for the privilege of serving you the El Dueno, and who can blame him?

If inflation is at “only” 2%, you’re paying $1 in taxes for every $50 you spend from savings, above and beyond income taxes, sales taxes, etc. Inflation is as real as those other taxes, just not as immediately obvious.

The Burrito Liberation Front’s mission is to  stop the Fed from creating, and the government from borrowing, so much money.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

On August 6, the US Senate’s Agriculture Committee rejected the latest version of the federal government’s quinquennial “farm bill.” I say “quinquennial” because Congress normally passes this legislation every five years, but it’s still operating on the 2018 version and has been arguing on a new version since 2023.

The major hang-up this year seems to be over a Republican plan that would require state governments kick in for the cost of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, aka “food stamps”). Democrats want a two-year delay on that requirement (most Americans don’t understand that SNAP is a welfare program for farmers, which is why it goes in the farm bill; feeding poor people is just a better-sounding excuse).

There’s also a set-to over the idea of “year-round E15,” under which gasoline with 15% ethanol could be sold year-round instead of only during certain months. That would mean bigger subsidies for corn farmers to produce stuff that isn’t food, pollutes the air, ruins older engines, and makes newer engines more expensive.

The “farm bill” concept is 93 years old, and it’s as bad an idea now, when only 1% of Americans work in agriculture, as it was in 1933’s first round of New Deal legislation, back when that number was 25%.

We keep getting better at producing more food with less labor, but apparently buried deep within the US Constitution there’s an amendment obligating American taxpayers and consumers to ensure that anyone whose great-grandfather wore overalls and drove a tractor gets to make a living and have a career doing the same thing. I can’t find it, but it must be in there somewhere, right? Otherwise, why does Congress spend more than $70 billion a year to make it so?

I don’t hate farmers — I come from a farming family and grew up on a farm myself — but I do think that some tough love would do them good. Not just moral good, material good.

Taxpayer subsidies won’t change the fact that even as American consumers pay more for food, American farmers earn less for growing that food. The whole idea behind the “farm bill” — that politicians in Washington are, or ever could be — better than free markets at deciding what gets grown and sold — is nonsense.

Instead of a “farm bill” every five years, why not try five years of free trade?

For nearly a decade, US presidents (of both parties) have screwed American farmers out of access to foreign markets by putting tariffs on foreign crops coming in, triggering “retaliation.” US agricultural exports to China fell from $38 billion in 2022 to $8 billion in 2025. The US now runs a “trade deficit” in agriculture, importing more than it exports.

Ditch the “farm bill,” end the tariffs … and let’s eat.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

“Attorney General James Uthmeier is putting the Roman Catholic Church on notice,” the Orlando Sentinel reports. “[I]f church officials take taxpayer funded vouchers for their schools, they should accept vaccine exemptions for students, too.”

The “school choice” movement in the US supports tax-funded “vouchers,” targeted tax credits, and “charter” schools, on the theory that giving parents more options on where, how, and by whom their children are taught isn’t just a good thing, but a thing that government ought to be, and can legitimately be, involved in.

Unfortunately, the real effect of that kind of “school choice” is to turn all the available options into carbon copies of the “public” school system it supposedly helps parents and students escape.

According to the Sentinel article, half a million Florida students use the state-issued, taxpayer-funded vouchers to exercise “school choice,” including nearly 83,000 of Florida’s 94,000 Catholic school attendees.

So far as I can tell, Uthmeier has never publicly declared a formal religious affiliation, although he cites generic “Christianity” as underpinning America’s Constitution and system of government.

The country’s founders disagreed, stating clearly in 1797’s Treaty of Tripoli that “the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion.”

Beyond his basic advocacy of Christianity, though, Uthmeier apparently considers his opinion on Catholic religious requirements more authoritative than the opinion of, um, the Catholic Church and the institutions it operates. Per the Sentinel piece, “Uthmeier, citing the Catholic Catechism, Pope Leo and scripture, argued Catholic doctrine does not allow its schools to reject vaccine exemptions for religious reasons.”

I’m neither a Catholic myself, nor well-educated in Catholic doctrine, and have no opinion on what that doctrine might imply about vaccination, but what we have here is not really a religious disagreement. It’s just Uthmeier announcing that, since the government pays the piper (with its subjects’ money), the government calls the tune.

Nor is the problem solely about religious schools. Any school that accepts taxpayer money finds strings attached to that money. We’ve already seen that happen with “private” college and university education.

When the GI Bill, Pell Grants, and government-guaranteed student loans started funding students at those “private” institutions, various government requirements on everything from accreditation to curriculum to race and sex discrimination came with those students and that money. The result: In terms of learning (as opposed to name, prestige, etc.), there’s probably little difference between attending most “private”  versus “public” colleges or universities.

As soon as any activity starts getting its FUNDING through politics, its OPERATIONS become subject to the same politics.

For decades, the closest you could get to avoiding that problem was to homeschool, and even then government often stuck its nose into your choices. Now several states have added homeschooling to their “school choice” funding options … as long as the homeschoolers follow a government-approved schedule, use government-approved curricula, and administer government-approved tests.

While Uthmeier’s vaccine diktat inflames “separation of church and state” arguments, its only real solution is “separation of SCHOOL and state.”

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY