In a bit of X discourse so dumb that it culminated in the vice president fat-shaming a newspaper columnist, the right-wing commentariat has spent the last 48 hours arguing over whether burritos are too expensive. Matt Walsh of the Daily Wire began the dialogue by blaming “insane” grocery prices on “stupid foreign wars,” followed by Turning Point’s Andrew Kolvet claiming a college student lamented that “a burrito shouldn’t cost $20.” Marc Thiessen, the aforementioned Washington Post columnist, noted that college students have access to cafeteria food, concluding with JD Vance commenting that Thiessen “has never missed a burrito.”End scene.Everyone except for the vice president here has a point: As Walsh noted, price stability indeed “should be the number one priority of every elected leader,” and as Kolvet pointed out, that prices are elevated is “a hangover from Covid and Biden-era inflation.” Similarly, Thiessen is correct that broke college students — which all of us former college students once were, by definition, as 18-year-olds with little value yet in the labor market — should rely predominantly on cooking or the cafeteria included in room and board instead of dining out at restaurants. But they’re all missing the forest for the trees. The fact is that the dismal consumer sentiment that has persisted throughout President Donald Trump’s second term is not because of burrito prices or even “inflation,” by the technical definition of the term. Rather, everyone is mad that price levels don’t go back down again, and as far as those prices go, they’re specifically livid over service prices. And, overwhelmingly, voter concerns about affordability remain dominated by housing, not any other arena of consumer goods.