It takes a truly breathtaking level of detachment to stare at a nation in decay and conclude that the real tragedy is the youth’s inability to budget.
On August 4, 2026, Turning Point USA spokesman Andrew Kolvet posted on X that one of his students had summed up the mood of a generation in a single sentence. “A burrito shouldn’t cost $20,” the student had told him, and Kolvet, trying to be honest, added that “a lot of this is a hangover from Covid and Biden era inflation, but the lived experience is the same. It just feels like basic things cost too much.”
That should have settled the matter. But it didn’t, because conservative commentators just can’t resist their go-to move: when someone raises concerns about rising costs or any shared economic pain and asks what’s driving it, they blame the messenger instead of the causes.
Marc Thiessen. an AEI resident fellow, Washington Post columnist, and former George W. Bush chief speechwriter, fired the opening salvo on August 5, 2026, saying: “Cry me a river. The burritos in the college cafeteria are included in your meal plan.” The shot drew immediate return fire, including from Vice President JD Vance, who wrote that “If you’ve ever met him in person, it’s quite obvious the man has never missed a burrito.”
Arch-zioconservative commentator Ben Shapiro piled on, dismissing young people’s affordability concerns: “I hear that young people are upset about $20 burritos. Okay, young people: a burrito does not cost $20.” He went further still, declaring that “if you’re paying $20 for a burrito and you’re not independently wealthy, you’re doing life wrong.” Outgoing Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX), who had recently lost his Republican primary to State Rep. Steve Toth, joined the fray that Wednesday night, was equally callous: “Just hearing about this dumb $20 burrito debate so just thought I’d make the losers on social media angry before going to bed. Stop whining, get a job, eat Ramen like the rest of us did in college, on a budget with 4 roommates. The market doesn’t care what you think something ‘should’ cost.”
For a moment it looked like the standard script would play out exactly as it always has, with the young and the anxious being scolded by conservative elites with steady paychecks and television contracts.
However, this time around there was nominal pushback from some elements of the system-approved Right. Christine Pushaw, press secretary to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), turned on Crenshaw directly, asking “how about young families with kids who are struggling to afford groceries because prices have doubled in 10 years while wages haven’t.” UnHerd US editor Sohrab Ahmari—an Iranian-born Catholic convert, labor-sympathetic post-liberal—published an essay titled “Why neocons are losing the great American burrito debate” pinning the inflation squarely on Trump’s Iran war. “In June, inflation rose to 4.2%, nearly double where it stood just before Operation Epic Fury,” Ahmari wrote, arguing that “the supply squeeze in the Strait of Hormuz puts inflationary pressure on gas prices in America...from transportation to agriculture to restaurants and hospitality.” His sharpest line was aimed directly at his fellow commentators: “This is what happens when commentators refuse to be honest about the consequences of their preferred policies—in this case, the inflationary effects caused by President Trump’s war with Iran.”
Telling ordinary Americans to stop complaining about economic precarity and reach for self-help strategies instead is nothing new for out-of-touch commentators. Melbourne luxury apartment developer Tim Gurner set the template on 60 Minutes Australia in May 2017 when he explained why young people could not buy homes. “When I was trying to buy my first home, I wasn’t buying smashed avocado for $19 and four coffees at $4 each,” he said—a man whose net worth was estimated at $460 million by the Australian Financial Review, lecturing an entire generation about brunch. Like nearly all business success stories in the Anglosphere, there’s more to the story than meets the eye. Critics quickly noted that Gurner had launched his property empire with a $34,000 loan from his grandfather at age 19.
The math never worked in this equation. The New York Times calculated that even if millennials completely adopted the eating-out habits of Baby Boomers, it would take roughly 113 years to save enough for a median down payment—assuming a 20 percent down payment on the median U.S. home price of $315,000 in March 2017 and a 1 percent annual yield rate. Gurner returned to the public stage in September 2023 to address the Australian Financial Review Property Summit, where he called for unemployment to “jump 40 to 50 percent” because “we need to remind people that they work for the employer, not the other way around.”
Conservative activist Christopher Rufo tried a gentler version of the same move in early 2025, insisting in a Substack post that the job market for young people without degrees was thriving because “even the Panda Express down the street from here has an advertisement for an assistant manager at $70,000 a year plus benefits,” and that Chipotle offered management tracks worth $100,000 with a free college degree attached. He acknowledged the post “started a firestorm on social media” and “turned into a wide ranging debate about the general prospects for Gen Z.”
The macroeconomic data confirms what Rufo and his conservative colleagues refuse to see. Pew Research Center found that the real average hourly wage in 2018 had “about the same purchasing power it did 40 years ago,” and that average hourly earnings peaked in January 1973, when $4.03 an hour bought what $23.68 would today. Pew’s 2018 study also found that most wage gains over the intervening decades flowed to the highest-paid tier of workers, leaving the bottom quarter of earners with real wage growth of just 4.3 percent since 2000. The Economic Policy Institute’s tracking is even starker: net productivity grew 90.2 percent from 1979 to 2025, while typical worker pay grew only 33 percent over the same stretch—a gap the EPI calculates would have translated to $16.40 more per hour today if pay had simply kept pace with productivity.
There is a second fault line running beneath the same wage stagnation that is often overlooked by the same conservatives who are enamored by boosting the big red line no matter the social costs. The foreign-born share of the American labor force has been rising steadily since the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act ended the restrictive quotas established throughout the 1920s. According to Pew, found that immigrants made up 12 percent of the labor force in 1995, rising to 19 percent in 2023—the most recent year with complete data—representing 33 million workers in the U.S. workforce, including approximately 23 million legal immigrants and 10 million illegal aliens.
By January 2025, the share had reached 20 percent. Foreign-born workers are heavily concentrated in the industries where American wages have stagnated hardest—making up 45 percent of farming, fishing and forestry workers, 30 percent of construction workers, and 24 percent of service workers—and foreign-born men participate in the labor force at 76.9 percent, well above the 65.8 percent rate for native-born men. Not only are White Americans’ living standards declining, but they face steeper challenges entering the workforce thanks to a constant deluge of labor that enters the country through authorized or unauthorized means.
Yet the standard conservative answer ignores these pressures entirely. For some conservative pundits, pushing more young men into the trades is the career path that will magically fix their economic woes. Television host Mike Rowe has built an entire foundation around it, and to his credit his Work Ethic Scholarship Program has distributed more than $16 million to over 2,600 recipients. Rowe often says the skills gap is real but so is a will gap, pointing to millions of open jobs that do not require a four-year degree against $1.7 trillion in student debt.
Marco Rubio tried the same argument with a specific number in 2015, telling a Fox Business debate audience that “welders make more money than philosophers, we need more welders and less philosophers.” The claim failed under scrutiny: median welder pay sat near $37,420, while mid-career philosophy majors averaged $85,000.
Further, the data still do not support the abandonment of college. Georgetown’s Center on Education and the Workforce found bachelor’s degree holders earn a median of $2.8 million over a career, 75 percent more than the $1.6 million earned by workers with only a high school diploma. Trades can pay well in specific fields, but they do not pay well universally, and the wage premium for a four-year degree persists even as enrollment among young men declines. Layer the immigration data on top of that and the picture gets bleaker. The same industries being sold to young American men as their escape route—construction, service work, skilled manual labor—are the same industries where foreign-born workers already hold an increasingly larger share of jobs and where wage growth has been most sluggish.
The current push for vocational training is a hollow facade that masks the reality of a regime dedicated to replacing the native population through mass migration and anti-White hiring practices. This strategy effectively consigns our youth to a future as the permanent underclass, providing domestic service to an upwardly mobile migrant class of largely South Asian extraction that is handed every structural advantage by our own institutions.
We should honor the dignity of the trades and ensure they pay well, but treating them as a panacea ignores the reality that only a nationalist overhaul of our political economy and the immediate shutdown of all forms of immigration can secure a viable future for our posterity. Moreover, to lecture a dispossessed people on “personal choices” while ignoring the structural warfare waged by organized Jewry and their capitalist collaborators is the hallmark of a regime nervous about being held accountable for its misdeeds. Our crisis is not one of inadequate individual routines but of deliberate displacement orchestrated by policymakers. And it can only be resolved by direct political confrontation with the hostile forces that profit from our immiseration.
Since we’re currently in the middle of a systemic looting operation managed by our “betters,” I suppose we’ll have to keep eating Ramen until we finally stop playing by their rules and start writing the menu ourselves.
NEXT:
The Self-Help Trojan Horse
Valuetainment Media sells a simple promise. Watch enough of the production company’s content, absorb enough strategy, and you too can escape the ordinary and build wealth. Patrick Bet-David is the pitchman, and his own life is the pitch. Born in Tehran in 1978 to an Assyrian and Armenian Christian family, he fled Iran with his parents after the Islamic …
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Excellent article José. Thank you for always fighting for justice. o/