The Swamp Ate Your Burrito and Called You Lazy for Noticing

By Buck Buckhorn · August 9, 2026

Opinion

Funny how it works. You spend a year and a half watching the price of everything climb, your paycheck stay flat, and your grocery receipt look like a car payment. Then a college kid says what every normal person in this country has been thinking: a burrito shouldn’t cost $20. And the establishment’s response? Eat ramen, peasant.

That’s not me being dramatic. That’s literally what Rep. Dan Crenshaw told people. “Stop whining, get a job, eat Ramen like the rest of us did in college.” A sitting member of Congress, pulling down a six-figure salary on your dime, telling a kid working through school that his problem is attitude, not arithmetic. Ben Shapiro piled on, sneering about “insane expectations that the government is going to provide us with gourmet-quality burritos.” Nobody asked for a government burrito, Ben. They asked why a foil-wrapped cylinder of rice and beans costs what a steak dinner used to. But go ahead and knock down that straw man. Real impressive stuff.

Then you had Marc Thiessen on the same page, bragging about his two roommates and two jobs like that’s a flex and not an indictment of the system he’s defending. Fox Business ran a segment about Gen Z buying “little treats.” You catch that? You can’t afford lunch, and a cable network with a seven-figure anchor desk is psychoanalyzing your coffee habit.

Here’s what nobody in the swamp wants to say out loud: the kid is right. Christine Pushaw, who works for DeSantis, actually pushed back on Crenshaw with the only honest question in this whole circus. “How about young families with kids who are struggling to afford groceries because prices have doubled in 10 years while wages haven’t?” That’s it. That’s the whole story. Prices doubled. Wages didn’t. You don’t need a degree from the Wharton School to do that math.

And who’s at the top of this pyramid of denial? The president himself. Trump called the affordability crisis a “con job” and a “hoax.” His Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, went on CNBC and said he’s “sick” of hearing about a K-shaped economy, then invented something called a “C economy” on the spot to explain why working people are actually doing great. Ask yourself who benefits from telling you the pain in your wallet isn’t real. It’s the same people who told you the jobs numbers were fine this week, the same people who started a war with Iran and then acted surprised when gas and food prices spiked. Sohrab Ahmari at UnHerd actually said the quiet part: the inflationary effects are tied to Trump’s war. You bomb the Strait of Hormuz, you disrupt oil, you disrupt oil, you disrupt everything that gets trucked to every grocery store and burrito shop in America. That’s not economics. That’s physics.

Even JD Vance, the vice president, broke ranks long enough to push back on Thiessen. But one tweet from the VP doesn’t undo a Cabinet full of people telling you to shut up and boil noodles.

The real hoax isn’t the price of a burrito. The hoax is the idea that the people running this economy have any idea what it costs you to live in it. They don’t. And they don’t care. The only thing they’re sick of is you noticing.

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