This AP report from yesterday strains credulity. Basically, a San Antonio was so enraged by the spike in the price of the Beefy Crunch Burrito from 0.99 cents to $1.49 that he fired an air gun at a Taco Bell employee. Later, he fired an assault rifle at a police officer who was presumably trying to get a handle on the situation. This is obviously a very sad story, both for the victims and the family of the enraged man, who will live with the consequences of this mess for years to come.

But this incident did make me think about food price inflation. Joshua Zumbrun of Bloomberg reports the following:

Consumer prices in the U.S. climbed more than forecast in February, led by the highest food prices since 2008 and rising fuel costs. The Labor Department’s consumer-price index increased 0.5 percent, the department said last week in Washington. Excluding volatile food and fuel costs, the so- called core gauge rose 0.2 percent for a second month, also more than estimated.
“Americans have been hit with sharply higher prices for food and energy,” said [Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland President Sandra] Pianalto. “These price increases have been especially hard on lower-income households, who spend a higher proportion of their after-tax income on food and energy.”
Pianalto said periods of rising food and energy inflation tend to be balanced by drops in inflation and that “to cause a lasting rise in inflation, the increases in food or energy prices have to be large enough and persist long enough that they spill over and cause sustained increases in a wide array of other consumer prices.”
“At this point, there is no evidence of broad spillover,” said Pianalto, adding that she expects the “underlying trend in broad consumer prices” to rise “only gradually” toward 2 percent by 2013. [Emphasis added]

I’m guessing that most of you understand the basic dynamics behind inflation, but Khan Academy offers a helpful primer for those of you who are rusty. (I’ve noticed that Salman Khan seems to be a fan of fiscal stimulus and quantitative easing, which makes me wonder if some brilliant critic of one or both should make videos of her own.)

One wonders about the political implications of these price increases. My basic take on the political landscape is that President Obama’s floor of political support is higher than President Bush’s floor, due to rock-solid support from African Americans and public sector union households and, to a lesser extent, Latinos and upscale white liberals. The Republican base proved more fickle during the Bush years for a variety of reasons. Despite the fact that unemployment has remained stubbornly high among African Americans, it seems that many black voters are more inclined to blame Republicans for what they see as obstructionist tactics than to hold the president himself to account. Public workers, meanwhile, rightly believe that Democrats are more keen on expanding the size and total compensation of the public workforce, which gives them a powerful reason to back the president.

So who will be blamed for rising food and energy prices? Voters inclined to support Republicans, particularly middle-income whites, will presumably blame the president, but he doesn’t have much ground to lose with these voters. Public workers and their families will blame Republican governors and their allies for what they’ll experience as diminishing purchasing power. Overall, my guess is that rising food and energy prices will just intensify existing patterns of support, which doesn’t strike me as good news for President Obama’s Republican challenger. I’m convinced that the Democrats will run a fear-driven campaign, the central premise of which is that conservatives want to strip public workers of protections, radically shrink entitlements, etc., all to protect the interests of the wealthy. As a conservative who supports public sector reform and entitlement reform, I believe that the right needs to develop a more effective counter-narrative, centered on the goal of sparking a rising economic tide. But that won’t be easy.