I went through the drive thru last year and spent almost $20 on 3 beef chalupas. The cashier looked puzzled before she told me the total lol. The one thing I want from that place, I knew it would cost me.
Technically, inflation is just another form of taxation.
Milton Friedman, an economist from the Chicago School of Monetarism, coined the phrase "inflation is taxation without legislation" to explain how inflation and rising prices can reduce the value of money and purchasing power, similar to higher taxes. Friedman believed that inflation could be managed by keeping the volume of moving liquidity in line with the amount of products in circulation.
Inflation is when the price of goods and services increases across the economy, which can reduce the value of assets and a currency's purchasing power. This can make taxpayers less well-off due to higher costs and "bracket creep", while also increasing the government's spending power. Some say that inflation is a "hidden tax" that can be especially harmful to people who have the least ability to pay.
Inflation and money creation are closely linked, and the government can create money through taxing, borrowing, or printing it. Printing money to finance a deficit is sometimes called an "inflation tax".
Even if every ingredient doubled in cost (same as domestic inflation) and profit is a 1/6 of the burrito, we wouldn’t even be at $4. This is corporate greed.
Perhaps for the consumer, not for the energy providers
What costs more? Gas or wind? Oil or solar? Coal or wave?
There's a premium charged for new technology, sure. To cover R&D costs, new tooling, etc, but once the machinery is made, the fuel is essentially free. The wind blows itself, the sun has its own fuel, the tides move freely
Energy arbitrarily costs more because those that sell it have decided it costs more. Aka corporate greed, which is what this post is complaining about in the first.
Monetary devaluation is the only thing that gives any thin-veiled justificstion for price increases. Anything not covered by the inflation calculator is greed.
The supply chain presumably cost something in the first pic too. The prices of those things should have also gone up according to inflation. So wouldn't they also be included in the "inflation adjusted" figure? It's not like they were calculating what it cost without needing a supply chain.
In fact, I would think that if anything, the overall price of supply chains would have decreased as technology got better (better fuel, better gas mileage, better routes, better forms of transportation, better computer models to predict outcomes, etc).
Supposedly the argument for the recent absurd food prices is because of oil prices increasing (translates to shipping costs increasing) so much with Russia invading Ukraine and everyones sanctions on Russian oil plus the disruption of wheat production in Ukraine.
As it turns out, moving oil across the ocean is really expensive. Even if you can buy oil at the same price in the US and Europe, it's still cheaper to buy it locally and not have to deal with moving it.