Cheeseburger Populism
Inflation Fighting, Topped with Culture Politics Moderation
Happy early Independence Day to everyone! I hope you all enjoy your day off on Friday.
Today’s article is about two things at once. 1) beef has gotten expensive and here’s what we can do to bring beef costs down and 2) the specific attributes of this challenge highlight how Democrats can blend Populism and the kind of pragmatic center-left reforms that are increasingly referred to as the ‘Abundance Agenda’, hence the name “Cheeseburger Populism.”
Beef Was Already Getting More Expensive- Trump is Making That Worse
This week, when you’re buying steaks and burgers for your Fourth of July grilling, you may notice that they’re more expensive than they used to be. In July 2019, the cost of a pound of sirloin steak was $8.28. Now it’s $12.20 — up about 80 cents per pound just since this time last year. Ground beef inflation has been even worse. In July 2019, a pound of ground beef cost $3.80. Now it’s $5.98. Again, a significant portion of that, about 50 cents worth, is in the last year. Over the past year, beef prices have risen 8.6%, more than almost any other item in the Consumer Price Index.
Some of the causes of this are outside of policymakers’ control, drought in the plains for example, but not all of it. Two of the Trump administration’s signature policies contribute to these high beef prices: deporting immigrants and increasing tariffs.
The meatpacking industry depends heavily on immigrant workers. In the top five meatpacking states (Nebraska, Iowa, Texas, Kansas, and Illinois) 56% of their workforce are foreign-born, with 67% of those workers being non-citizens. Nationwide, nearly half of meatpacking workers are immigrants.
Trump's deportation policies are already removing experienced workers from processing plants, creating immediate labor shortages. As Trump himself acknowledged, his "very aggressive" immigration enforcement is taking "very good, long time workers" from farms and meatpacking facilities, with these jobs being "almost impossible to replace." These labor disruptions create supply-chain bottlenecks that drive up beef prices. We have more affordable steaks and burgers because of the hard work these immigrants do; Trump’s deportations directly threaten that affordability.
Tariffs are adding to this burden. America is simultaneously the world's largest beef exporter and importer: we sell premium cuts abroad while importing lean trimmings that get blended with domestic beef to make affordable ground beef. In fact, more of America’s beef consumption is now imported than ever before, which means that consumers get hit harder by tariffs than they might have in the past. And of that imported beef, Canada supplies about half and Mexico provides another third. Trump's 25% tariffs on Canadian and Mexican beef imports directly raise the prices you pay at the grocery store and in the fast-food drive-through. These aren't luxury imports or from a geopolitical adversary. They're basic commodities from our closest allies that keep burger prices reasonable.
The cost-of-living lesson here is that immigration and trade make life more affordable for regular people. But the political lesson here is that this is an opening for Democrats. People HATE grocery price inflation. In fact, when you ask people who are concerned about inflation what they are most concerned about, they mention groceries more than anything else.
Inflation is also Donald Trump’s worst issue. He is at negative 22 on this. Democrats need to relentlessly focus on cost-of-living. Cheeseburgers, and groceries more generally, are a good opening for that. And Trump seems to conceptually struggle with the very idea of groceries. It is not hard to communicate the truth that Donald Trump is a rich elite from Manhattan who is making regular people’s burgers for the grill more expensive.
Reducing Regulatory Barriers Helps Regular Folks
As this newsletter has argued since we started, Democrats are more effective when they focus on cost-of-living issues. A recent example: Zohran Mamdani’s well-received ad during his NYC mayoral campaign highlighted how too few food truck permits drive up both permit costs and food prices. His solution: issue more permits. . Essentially, he argued for helping the little guy by reducing regulatory barriers to competition in the food market. For someone who’s associated with the socialism-friendly wing of the Democratic Party, it was nice to see him advocating for a reducing regulations policy approach.
Meanwhile, in a different part of the market, Republicans — despite their professed belief in the power of the free market — are adding regulatory barriers against plant-based and lab-grown meat. Plant-based meat has dramatically improved over time. Even Glenn Beck, nobody's idea of a cultural progressive, praised the Impossible Burger. If consumers have access to more plant-based options, at least some of them will choose them, attracting investment and innovation that improves taste and increases market share.
Unfortunately, Republicans have responded with heavy-handed government intervention. Multiple GOP-controlled states are banning lab-grown meat outright, while others burden plant-based producers with regulatory red tape. It's pure culture war posturing that hurts consumers' wallets.
Plant-based alternatives aren't perfect substitutes for beef, and won't directly lower the beef component of the Consumer Price Index. But if we're serious about making grilling season more affordable, we should embrace policies that increase supply and competition across the entire protein market. Republicans claim to support free markets and consumer choice, yet they're using big government power to protect incumbent industries from competition. That's cronyism, not capitalism. Consumers should get to decide what they want to eat, not politicians picking winners and losers.
Meatpacking Has an Antitrust Problem, and Antitrust Should Be About Prices
The meatpacking industry has consolidated considerably over the last few decades. While that brings some benefits like economies of scale and cost savings, it also makes anti-competitive behavior easier.
Two years ago, a group of purchasers including Target and BJ’s Wholesale filed a lawsuit against the four dominant meatpacking companies (Tyson, Cargill, JBS, and National Beef) alleging that they colluded to raise beef prices. Some of these meatpackers like JBS have already had to pay large fines for price-fixing in the past. They’ve also had to pay big fines for wage-fixing. These companies have a poor track record when it comes to anticompetitive behavior. The Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission should continue vigorous enforcement. Antitrust has a clear role here.
Some policymakers on the Democratic Party’s left flank want to make antitrust about more than just prices. This is a strain of thinking known as the Neo-Brandeisian school or more colloquially as “hipster antitrust.” Among other initiatives, they’ve argued for reviving the Robinson-Patman Act (RPA), a long dormant act, that -if re-enacted- would undercut large retailers’ ability to keep prices low and so would act as a tax on all Americans but particularly low-income and working class Americans who spend a disproportionate share of their income on food and retail. One of the middlemen advocating for the RPA even admitted it would raise prices at the larger stores where many millions of Americans shop, saying a re-invigorated RPA would mean “our costs would go down, and Walmart’s costs would go up.”
This is a problem. A smarter approach that blends populism and pragmatic Abundance Agenda politics recognizes that antitrust should focus on costs that regular people pay, not elite hipster preferences for small and artisanal businesses. Regular people win when they can buy ground beef for less at Walmart or Costco instead of paying artisanal prices at a smaller vendor.
Cheeseburger Populism as Moderate Cultural Politics
Consumption choices are an important component of signaling to people that you understand and value them. Arizona Senator Ruben Gallego recently discussed how he talks to lots of Latino men who want a big-ass truck and he explains his economic policy views as a way of helping them get that big-ass truck. If you're going to try to combine Abundance and populism, this is the right way you do it: connect Abundance economics to cultural populism in service of creating a Democratic Party that is more avowedly moderate. This is correct on the merits and can help Democrats be more competitive in swing districts.
"Cheeseburger Populism" offers Democrats a way to engage in this kind of cultural politics without getting trapped in divisive social issues that alienate moderate voters. We need to show that we approve of and share regular people’s consumption choices. Only 1% of the population is vegan and less than 5% is vegetarian. Being vegetarian, and especially being vegan, is culturally alien to most Americans. People should eat what they want but Democrats would be smart to signal “We’re not the party of vegans, we’re the party of people who eat burgers on the Fourth of July.” There’s nothing personally wrong with vegans obviously (it’s their choice), but in an enthusiastically carnivorous country, it’s smart politics to be enthusiastically carnivorous.
This approach reclaims populist messaging from Republicans who've spent decades positioning themselves as defenders of working-class interests while actually implementing policies that make life more expensive. Trump talks tough about elites while his tariffs function as a hidden tax on groceries. GOP governors claim to support free markets but then ban lab-grown meat. None of that is genuinely helpful to “the people”, it's just culture war performance art that hurts consumers' wallets. Embracing cheeseburger populism lets us take the mantle of inflation fighters while also being culturally normie.
Blending populism and pragmatic, supply-oriented, regulatory barrier reducing politics means focusing on the cost of living because that’s what regular people care about. It means taking on elites (whether in government or business) who make regular people's lives more expensive. It means being economically pro-market and, relatedly, being sharply critical of regulatory capture. It means expanding consumer choice rather than using government power to protect incumbent industries from competition. And it means defending immigrants who keep food affordable rather than scapegoating them.
Cheeseburger Populism works because it's tangible, relatable, and cuts across traditional political divides. Nobody wants to pay more for ground beef because politicians are playing culture war games. Nobody likes cronyism or businesses that collude. Nobody wants to hear another lecture from a vegan or have some hipster try to make them buy their meat from a small artisanal vendor that charges three times as much if that’s not what they want to do. And, maybe most importantly, nobody wants Donald Trump, a New York City elite who has never worried about grocery bills once in his life, making their Fourth of July more expensive.
-GW