How burritogate roiled the right exposing a dangerous disconnect on affordability

How much should a burrito cost?That question has sparked an all-out social-media war on the right this week, dividing influencers, media figures and even Vice President JD Vance into angry factions at odds over affordability — this election season’s hot-button issue.It started when podcaster Matt Walsh posted a complaint about “insane” grocery prices, urging Republicans to “end the stupid foreign wars and focus on this issue.It’s one of the main reasons socialists are gaining power.”Turning Point USA spokesman Andrew Kolvet agreed, adding that one of his group’s college-student members had provided “his take on affordability: ‘A burrito shouldn’t cost $20.’”That’s when podcast producer Joel Berry pointed out that his wife “made homemade burritos for our family of 8 and it cost less than $20 total for everyone.”“I’m beginning to think the affordability crisis is really an ‘I don’t know how to cook’ crisis,” he added — setting off a nasty old-school flame war.More contentious than the war with Iran — and very possibly just a proxy fight for it — burritogate is dividing Republicans at a time when leftists are veering into full-bore communism as the solution for rising costs.And no one seems to be interested in the fact that, as David Harsanyi laid out in these pages, food prices have actually gone down as part of the average American family’s take-home income, from around 42% in 1901 to 9.7% today.Or in reflecting on the core economic truth that “foreign wars” have nothing to do with the inflation that spiked during Joe Biden’s presidency and continues to plague us — or with leftist policies, like an ever-increasing minimum wage, that’s made fast food so much more expensive.Bad ideas have consequences, and a costlier burrito is one of them. It doesn’t even seem to matter that no one can pinpoint the existence of this rage-inducing $20 burrito.Many noted that a fully loaded steak burrito at Chipotle with,...