A basket of bacon and eggs, whole wheat bread and butter, coffee and whole milk, and orange juice cost on average $32.47 in the United States in 3Q2024. Stretched out over a week, your breakfast cost you $4.64 a day.
That same basket in Jan 2026 is now $35.00 on average, up $2.53 or 7.8%.
Stretched out over a week breakfast now costs $5.00 a day.
Meanwhile OJ hit a new high, and despite removing some coffee-related tariffs, coffee hit a new record high price in Jan 2026, too.
The homeowner with the coop up the street sells his for $5 a dozen, but he was out this morning.
The homeowner with the coop down the street sells his for $4 a dozen, but he was out, too.
At the corner convenience store I had to pay $6.49.
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| sirloin |
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| chuck roast |
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| beef roasts |
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| beef steaks |
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| ground beef |
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| ice cream |
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| sugar |
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| coffee |
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| orange juice |
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| chicken |
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| ground chuck |
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| round steak |
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| round roast |
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| American cheese |
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| beer |
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| wine |
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| electricity |
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| eggs |
Sam's Club, when it has eggs in stock, is charging in the mid to high 4s per dozen.
The Wall Street Journal doesn't mention it here.
This guy's been working for the company for 10 years and he's still renting.
... Daniel Campbell, who maneuvers steel auto parts around a Stellantis factory north of Detroit, says he and many of his colleagues are worried about layoffs.
“I’m scared,” he said from his brick bungalow on the west side of Detroit, which he rents with two roommates. “We’re complaining about gas and eggs now. Who is going to be able to buy these cars that are already $80,000, and then you make it $90,000?”
The 46-year-old UAW member, who makes about $30 an hour, and one of his roommates have talked about trimming their spending, including eating out less and cutting clothing and electronics purchases.
“There’s going to come a time where we’re not going to be able to go and spend,” he said.
At work, the assembly lines have been running faster in recent weeks as Stellantis has tried to stockpile parts ahead of the tariffs, Campbell said. He and his co-workers are running out of room to store the parts. ...
The indispensable contribution driving investment back home to the United States will have to be penalizing foreign investment's income and rewarding long term domestic investment's income through the tax code, which also means dramatically raising ordinary income tax rates. In other words, returning to the status quo ante-Reagan.
The reason is we have learned that rich people don't know what's best to do with their own money any more than the rest of us do. The rich have not done what's best for the country. Ronald Reagan was completely wrong about that. They took one look at the quick and easy money and immediately started looking to maximize it elsewhere. The tax code used to force them to do the right thing, which was keep it here and invest at home if they wanted to get richer. And that is what made all of us richer, with jobs with which we could afford to marry, buy houses and cars, raise children and send them to college.
People who got rich through Reagan's low ordinary income tax rates fell for the cheap labor abroad to get even richer, but now here they and we sit together beholden to countries abroad who are hostile toward us.
The chart below shows how domestic investment dominated foreign throughout the post-war until the Reagan tax reform of 1986. Investment abroad did not overtake domestic until 1993, at 105% of private fixed investment, after the Reagan tax cuts had taken full effect. Foreign as a percentage of domestic investment is double that and more today. For every four dollars invested at home in 2024, eight were invested abroad.
It took decades to screw this up, and it will take decades to fix it. But as sure as I'm sitting here neither J. D. Vance nor Donald Trump nor any other politician out there has any clue about this.
Sorting for the 100 largest flocks of egg-layers affected by H5N1 bird flu since 2022 which have had to be destroyed, as of this morning I count in excess of 21 million chickens destroyed to stop the spread so far in 2025 alone.
That would be 75-cents for an egg that cost the producer about 19-cents.
I got a $1 off 18 eggs yesterday at a nearby health food store and paid $6.99, 39-cents each.
Why eggs are selling for over $9 a dozen in some places—and when prices are expected to drop
The biggest factor pushing up egg prices is a wave of avian flu, which began in early 2022 and led to the culling of millions of egg-laying hens. With demand remaining steady, the reduced supply has caused prices to rise.
This is the second time egg prices have surged since 2022, following a previous wave of avian flu that wiped out large numbers of egg-laying hens and caused supply shortages that year. Avian flu has wiped out over 100 million chickens since a major outbreak began in early 2022.
You would think chicken prices would go up, too, but I consistently get chicken thighs in bulk at Sam's for $1.38/lb, and have done so right through the pandemic.
And the rotisserie chicken remains $4.98, too.
We'll get December consumer prices tomorrow. Here's November's chart for eggs:
Trump was NEVER all-in about his immigration positions, which went back and forth from the beginning.
People forget that he and Ann Coulter had a knock-down drag-out fight in the Oval Office about immigration sometime in late 2017, early 2018. The newly elected president had done NOTHING about the border wall, deportations, and the Dreamers. He had used her book about immigration to distinguish himself from the numerous other GOP candidates and get himself elected, and promptly tossed her aside like all the other women he has cheated on.
Trump is nothing if he's not a user.
People also forget the blow up in August 2016 before he was even president, when Trump toyed publicly with the idea of a DACA amnesty. NeverTrump noticed:
Donald Trump ... is suddenly embracing the idea of working out a way to give legal status to undocumented immigrants who have been here a long time and have kept out of trouble. ... Trump's latest comments that it makes no sense to deport millions of people who have lived in the U.S. for a decade or more -- which constitutes two-thirds of the undocumented immigrants here now -- are a far cry from what he had been saying for the previous 14 months.
MAGA ignored this. Conservatives like Coulter were demoralized, months before they were actually betrayed. Trump only narrowly defeated Hillary.
And few remember how he blew himself up in the 2018 elections, losing the House, in part because he used DACA as a bargaining chip in early 2018 in a failed attempt to get his wall funded, shutting down the government in the process. His lone achievements in his first two years were a modest and temporary tax cut package, and a massive defense spending bill to restore what Obama had gutted.
The legions of disaffected young men hoping Trump-Vance would bring a new era of opportunity for native born Americans over cheaper foreign workers are sadly experiencing buyer's remorse because of Trump's capitulation to the Tech Bros, discovering anew that Trump is the snake in the parable he always used to talk about on the campaign trail.
Welcome to hell part deux.
3.2%, 3.4% . . . and 3.5% year over year now in November 2024.
Overall prices are up 3% yoy in November.
Wholesale prices rose 0.4% in November, more than expected:
Final-demand goods prices leaped 0.7% on the month, the biggest move since February of this year. Some 80% of the move came from a 3.1% surge in food prices, according to the BLS.
Within the food category, chicken eggs soared 54.6%, joining an across-the-board acceleration in items such as dry vegetables, fresh fruits and poultry. Egg prices at the retail level swelled 8.2% on the month and were up 37.5% from a year ago, the BLS said in a separate report Wednesday on consumer prices.
The Fed is expected still to cut again at the next meeting despite all the evidence pointing to persistently high and increasing inflation, hiding behind the skirts of fear of job losses, a smokescreen for gifting easier money to speculators, and to federal authorities who now need to finance $36.1 trillion in the national debt at lower rates.
20Y and 30Y bonds are revolting, demanding 4.624 and 4.551 as we speak, now the highest yields across the curve, as the short end yields in US Treasury bills come back down to earth.
Many other basic foods, not shown, are still near their all-time-highs, like dried beans for example, or potatoes, sugar, and flour, but you knew that if you've been grocery shopping recently.
Eggs, at $3.204/dozen on average nationally in August 2024, are higher right now than their average annual price EVER: $2.857 in 2022, $2.796 in 2023, and $2.469 in 2015. Eggs averaged $2.798 in the first half of 2024.
In August, Trump reiterated his opposition to Florida’s ban on abortions
after six weeks. Asked if he supported an amendment to the state’s
constitution expanding the right to abortion, Trump said,
“I am going to be voting that we need more than six weeks.” Faced with a
firestorm of criticism from anti-abortion groups, Trump campaign
officials maintained he “has not yet said how he will vote on the ballot
initiative.” ...
At the end of August, with polls showing a slight lead for Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump announced that “because we want more babies,” his administration would require either the federal government or insurance companies to pay the entire cost (which typically runs in the tens of thousands of dollars per individual) of IVF treatments for all Americans. He did not specify whether his proposal would be implemented through the Affordable Care Act, which he has promised to repeal, or whether he has become an advocate of socialized medicine. Nor did Trump reconcile the plan with the 2024 GOP platform, which has language that seems to support rights of citizenship, under the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, to fertilized eggs, embryos and fetuses.
More.
Trump has learned nothing.
