The average price of a dozen eggs in May 2025 was $4.548, which is 157% higher than the average price of $1.769 2010-2020

 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.

 

CPI food inflation year over year in May 2025 was 2.87%, 53% higher than the 2010-2020 average of 1.87%

 

Pizza chains struggle because low income consumers can no longer afford prices up 30% since 2019

 Bloomberg reports here.

 

 

Eleven foods which made new all-time high average prices in April 2025

 Round roast $7.616/lb

All roasts 7.995

Round steak 8.627

All steaks 11.12

Sirloin steak 12.326

Ground chuck 5.996

100% ground beef 5.801

All ground beef 6.142 

Coffee 7.536

Sugar 1.021

 

Beer 1.827/pint

Core cpi inflation, which excludes food and energy, came in at 2.8% year over year in April 2025, and so did food inflation

 Core cpi inflation at 2.8% year over year is 55% higher than the average rate of 1.8% which prevailed 2010-2020.

 

core

food

Holy cow, I paid $15.92 for this ground turkey on March 31, now it's $18.88, up 18.6% in less than a month

 

Real Clear Politics puts up a discussion between two billionaires 43% of whose business is government contracts demanding that government bureaucrats be prosecuted for fraud

The chutzpah of these parasites is really something, but Real Clear should be ashamed for promoting it.

The billionaires complain that expenditures far outpace revenues, but taxes must never be raised to pay for them:

"My answer on tax policy, what should tax rates be? Just always a little bit lower. I'm not going to tell you the number, they should always be a little bit lower."

Billionaires for tax cuts!

Meanwhile the $40 billion USAID budget was nothing but a virtue signaling food for the poor scam to these two:

"And so much of this left-wing philanthropy nonprofit world, I think it was just a cover for borderline criminal activity."

 

Prosecute Bureaucrats for Defrauding Government

Peter Thiel, American Optimist

 

 

18 things which set new price records on an average basis in 1Q2025: beef, beef, and more beef, ice cream, sugar, coffee, OJ, chicken, American cheese, beer, wine, eggs, electricity

 

sirloin

chuck roast

beef roasts

beef steaks

ground beef

ice cream

sugar

coffee

orange juice

chicken

ground chuck

round steak

round roast

American cheese

beer

wine

electricity

eggs

Ten foods making new all time high average prices in March 2025 per FRED Economic Data

Round roast $7.557 per pound

Round steak $8.554

Ground chuck $5.854

Ground beef 100% $5.79

Ground beef all $6.137

Beef steaks all $10.98

Eggs $6.227 per dozen

Coffee $7.385 per pound

White sugar $1.014

Beer $1.821 per pint

 

Liars all over Elon Musk's X kept saying Trump brought egg prices down, but in March 2025 they were more expensive than ever on an average basis: $6.227 per dozen

Sam's Club, when it has eggs in stock, is charging in the mid to high 4s per dozen.

 

Core cpi inflation finally comes down under 3% yoy in Mar 2025, seasonally adjusted or not, to 2.8%, finally lower than Apr 2021 for the first time in four years

 ... Food prices climbed 0.4% on the month. Egg prices rose another 5.9% and were up 60.4% from a year ago. Moreover, shelter prices, among the most stubborn components of inflation, increased just 0.2% in March and were up 4% on a 12-month basis, the smallest gain since November 2021. ...

More.

The expectation was for core at 3%.

Trump's biggest tariff, 50%, was on tiny landlocked poverty-stricken Lesotho inside South Africa, over a minuscule trade imbalance of $234.5 MILLION in 2024, which is under a treaty for godsakes

 

Lesotho's exports to the US in 2024 were valued at $237.3 MILLION lol. Trump now wants 50% of that.

King George III, who also was nuts, was a benevolent king to America compared to this guy.

 Trump's biggest tariff was on tiny Lesotho. Here's what to know about the African kingdom.

... Mr. Trump's so-called "Liberation Day" tariffs included a whopping 50% levy on the small, impoverished nation's imports, and the Lesotho government quickly said it would send a delegation to Washington. ...

Lesotho's annual gross domestic product of $2 billion is highly reliant on exports, mostly of textiles, including jeans. ...

The White House claims, by way of [its] formula, that Lesotho imposes 99% tariffs and other barriers on U.S. imports. ...

With an annual gross domestic product of just over $2 billion, Lesotho is largely dependent on South Africa — it biggest trading partner — from which it imports most of its food, selling water in return.

The economy has been heavily reliant on textile exports bound for the United States through the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) trade deal, which provides duty-free access to the U.S. market for some African products. The Trump administration's imposition of tariffs on African nations has raised questions over how likely the White House is to renew the AGOA pact when it expires in September. ...

Car manufacturing jobs, so-called good jobs, already don't pay enough to enable these Detroit auto workers to buy their own homes and have families, and they fear layoffs because of the tariffs

 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. ...

Just as 9.7 million of 43 million student loan borrowers become past due again, cars they can't afford to buy anyway soar in price due to tariffs, a one-two punch alienating the youth vote from Trump

 Over 9 million student loan borrowers past due after bills restarted, Fed estimates

... A new student loan delinquency can cause a borrower’s credit score to drop more than 150 points, the Fed warns.

Trump’s auto tariffs will likely push car prices up thousands of dollars

... The tariffs will kick in at midnight on April 3, and Trump has said they will be “permanent.” ...

#RecessionIndicator: Young Americans are losing confidence in the economy — and it shows online

... A spokesperson for Klarna acknowledged to NBC News that people needing to pay for meals on credit is “a bad indicator for society.” ...

J. D. Vance is fixated on cheaper foreign labor as the cause of American industrial decline when it was the tax preference given to ordinary income over long term capital investment which made it attractive

Vance: The Two Conceits Of Globalization That Squeezed American Manufacturing From Both Ends

 

". . . cheap labor is fundamentally a crutch, and it’s a crutch that inhibits innovation. I might even say that it’s a drug that too many American firms got addicted to . . ."

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. 

 

 

Federal Judge William Alsup orders tens of thousands of federal employees fired by Mad King Ludwig rehired

 

 Thousands of fired federal workers must be rehired immediately, judge rules 

... Alsup, a San Francisco-based appointee of President Bill Clinton, ordered the Defense, Treasury, Energy, Interior, Agriculture and Veterans Affairs departments to “immediately” offer all fired probationary employees their jobs back. The Office of Personnel Management, the judge said, had made an “unlawful” decision to terminate them. ... Alsup is the first federal judge to order the administration to broadly unwind the firing spree that has roiled the federal workforce during Trump’s first two months in office. ...

Beef, breakfast, and bliss just went up again: A dozen basic foods posting new all time high average prices in February 2025 according to the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank

Choice chuck roast $8.104/lb

Ground chuck $5.744

All uncooked ground beef $5.96

All uncooked beef roasts $7.995

Round roast $7.49

Round steak $8.485

 

Eggs $5.897/dozen

Frozen orange juice $4.492/12oz

Coffee $7.246

White Sugar $1.011

 

Table wine $14.087/liter

Beer $1.819/pint

 

 

Fascism delayed: Intel postpones Ohio chip plant opening from this year to 2030 after receiving $8 billion from bi-partisan Chips Act

But yeah, let's claw back money for food and medicine programs under USAID.

Intel delays Ohio chip plant opening to next decade, was supposed to start production by 2026

... The company said it won’t complete construction on the first plant until 2030, starting operations that year or the next. The second factory in the up to $100-billion complex will likely be finished in 2031 and start running the following year. The company had initially planned to begin production on the first plant in 2025. ...

RFK Jr cancels regular March meeting of flu vaccine panel which determines for which flu strains vaccines will be developed for next fall and winter

 

A crucial March meeting of vaccine advisors to the Food and Drug Administration has been canceled without explanation, a member of the advisory panel told CNBC on Wednesday. ... CDC data shows the flu has caused up to an estimated 910,000 hospitalizations since October, which puts the season on track to be the most severe in at least a decade. ...

Reported here.

The barbarians are inside the gates.

Now the Trump administration is imitating the most odious revolutionary rhetoric of the Obama administration

 

WH's Karoline Leavitt: Trump "Is Fundamentally Transforming Our Country For The Better"

 

We are fundamentally transforming our country for the better, truly restoring our government, the 27-year old know-nothing says, when they're actually gutting it. 

These people all think they're so smart.

 

They think they're cutting something down to size which is already on its knees. Federal employment today has hardly been lower as a percentage of civilian population in the post-war. The low point was achieved already in 2018. The Leviathan State is a complete myth.

 

If Trump truly restored our government, he'd be hiring dramatically, not firing. 

For all of Trump’s and Musk’s talk of efficiency, their policies will likely slow down the government. The state needs capacity to perform core tasks, such as collecting revenue, taking care of veterans, tracking weather, and ensuring that travel, medicine, food, and workplaces are safe. But Trump seems intent on pushing more employees to leave and making the civil service more political and an even less inviting job option. He bullies federal employees, labeling them as “crooked” and likening their removal to “getting rid of all the cancer.” A smaller, terrified, and politicized public workforce will not be an effective one.

To start, let’s dispense with the notion that the government is too big. It is not. As a share of the workforce, federal employment has declined in the past several decades. Civilian employees represent about 1.5 percent of the population and account for less than 7 percent of total government spending. According to the nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service, seven out of 10 civilian employees work in organizations that deal with national security, including departments—such as Veterans Affairs and Homeland Security—that the public supports.

The reality is that the federal government has long faced a human-capital crisis. ...

More.

The country is $36 trillion in debt because it is not taxing enough, and hasn't been taxing enough since Ronald Reagan. We pretend we can borrow to infinity for what we want, but we can't afford it all anymore. That is why they're surrendering to Putin, and taking a meat cleaver to DC.

This is not a serious country, otherwise a South African wouldn't be running it.