Hacker News Reader

Comment by josefritzishere | Hacker News Reader

It's almost like tariffs were a bad idea.

That and causing massive sudden disruption within the domestic agricultural labor pool.

I'm sure that somehow this is all Biden's fault though.

by labor pool you mean foreign labor paid under the table at slave wages w/o benefits or tax collection who meanwhile use US ERs as primary care doctors and US schools to feed and watch their kids for them.

If the employees are being paid under the table, they would mean the employers were committing an obvious crime opening the employer to extortion. However, if the employees were Using fake social security numbers, then it would give the employers the benefit of the doubt. It also would mean the employees do pay takes, collected by their employers. From what I’ve heard, the latter is most common.

Most undocumented immigrant laborers actually do pay taxes despite not being able to take advantage of what they are being taxed for (eg. social security).

And there have always been aspects of using undocumented labor that are negative and exploitative and I'm all for the US government making real positive changes in this area, but any policymaker coming at this from a non-racist perspective that wanted to make real changes would do it by fining or charging the people who are hiring the immigrants.

Of course, that's not what the Trump administration has done or will do.

Even if they pay no other taxes, they do pay sales tax on their purchases at stores, gas stations, and so on. And those taxes go to the state or local government, and help pay for school and other services.

The annualized growth rate of CPI food prices from Jan 2021 to Jan 2025 was 5.5%. From Jan 2025 to Sept 2025, it was 2.2%.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPIUFDSL#

It's due increase in money supply during Covid stimulus spending.

Covid was years ago. Right now it's tariffs.

Amazing to me that a supposedly big part of Trump's win in 2024 was that people were voting for him to turn down the magic grocery price reduction knob and *poof* we'd be back to pre-pandemic prices. Yet somehow I don't think this will be as much of an electoral liability for Republicans in the 2026 midterms as it was with Harris in 2024. So I guess voters didn't actually care that much about cost of living increases?

It's happening in Europe too so it's more likely inflation.

If only nearly everyone, everywhere had seen this coming...

U.S. food prices rose by 23.6 percent from 2020 to 2024.

> U.S. food prices rose by 23.6 percent from 2020 to 2024.

After historic food price roses during a global pandemic and another round of bird flu in four years, you’d think a good president would do things to lower them, not continue to increase them!

Annualized inflation is still lower than the month before he was inaugurated (2.9% < 3.0%). And that 3.0% was a dream compared to most of Biden's presidency.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com