Ep. 1815 - The Hidden Reasons Why Grocery Prices Are Still Rising

**Matt Walsh** (0:00)
But just a couple of years ago that the price of eggs was the single most important issue in American politics, and for good reason. When a dozen eggs cost nearly $8, it's not easy to make the case that the economy is fine or that we're still a first world country even. It's also difficult to convince people to hold on to power, which is why Donald Trump hammered the issue at every opportunity. Even if Democrats hadn't nominated a dementia patient and an alcoholic in the same year, there's a good chance that all by itself, the price of eggs would have sunk the party. A couple of years later, there's some good news and some bad news. The good news is that the price of eggs has returned to earth. Retail egg prices are now around 40 percent lower than they were in June of last year, and they're continuing to decline every month. So problem solved on that front, I guess. There's evidently no more bird flu to worry about, and people can once again cook breakfast, or at least part of breakfast. The bad news is that the price of basically all of the other groceries in your refrigerator has been going in the opposite direction. And I'm not just talking about a small increase here. As you've probably noticed, it's very significant across the board, but it's probably even worse than you realize. So here are some hard numbers to give some historical context. This is from the New York Post. Food prices in the US have shot up by 33% over the last seven years, the biggest jump in grocery prices in half a century with no relief in sight, while rampant inflation was to blame for the biggest surge during the pandemic, prices have continued to soar since, with ground beef best demonstrating the out-of-control market as it hit $6.82 a pound in June, a 79% increase from 2019 according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. Now, a big part of the reason why beef is so expensive is that the supply of cattle has dwindled by some estimates to its lowest levels in many decades. That's in part because of years of droughts which have killed the grass that keeps the cattle fed.
We'll talk more about the root causes in a moment because obviously it's very important, but beef is not the only problem. Food prices in general increased by more than 2% in 2024, nearly 3% in 2025, and food purchased away from home at restaurants and drive-thrus, for example, has been even worse. So-called food away from home prices increased by roughly 4% in both 2024 and 2025 which is much faster than the historical average.
All of these increases, of course, are stacked on top of the previous increases. So it's a compounding problem. New York Post article continues, between 2012 and 2019, the US saw a total increase in food prices of just 6.4 percent, with the cost skyrocketing once the pandemic hit in the early months of 2020 Following the pandemic's damaging effects between January 21 and January 23, food prices surged by about 21 percent, and costs have continued to go up by nearly 10 percent.
It's yet more evidence demonstrating that the COVID lockdowns ruined everything. The lockdowns had second-order effects that no one in power considered at the time, or at least they didn't care about, even though they were obvious to anyone who'd ever worked a real job. But before we get into all of those second-order effects, and there are a lot of them, and how our leaders caused this crisis, the most important takeaway here is that food prices are worse than they've been in memory. And this is not merely a political problem. It's not simply bad for Republicans in the midterms, just like the price of eggs was bad for Kamala Harris in 2024 History shows that when food becomes harder to obtain, people get restless and they get angry very quickly. If you drew up a list of every revolution that ever took place, by far the number one cause is that, or one of the number one contributing factors anyway, is that food suddenly became too scarce or too expensive. Now, it doesn't matter where you look, from France to Russia to Africa to Europe, imperial China, in every single region, in every single era, people have had a rather strong and understandable desire to eat and feed their families affordably.
Prevent them from doing so, or make it considerably more expensive and difficult for them to do so, and you will have created a powder keg situation where even the worst people in the world will be ready to take advantage. In their desperation, the citizenry won't hesitate to vote for charismatic foreign-born socialists who promise to resolve the food shortages. Even though everybody with a grade school education understands that socialism is how you cause food shortages, not how you solve them. Socialist leaders won't merely make things worse, they will destroy the country, which of course is their goal.