The Texas State Fair Suggests the Economy Is At a Turning Point

By Jacob Weindling  |  October 21, 2025 | 2:46pm
Photo by Brandon Bell/Getty Images
Stagflation
The Texas State Fair Suggests the Economy Is At a Turning Point

James Talarico, the man with the spiritual Bernie-style politics I wrote about earlier this month, filmed a campaign commercial for his Senate bid capitalizing on the lowest attendance at the Texas State Fair since 2018. This is obviously a political advertisement and not investigative reporting, but it’s a very classic boots on the ground style ad where the data Talarico cites is correct and the proof is in the lack of foot traffic at the Texas State Fair. Texas lost millions in revenue because this major event fell flat because, well, everything is just too damn expensive.

Tariffs are ruining everything — including the Texas State Fair.

$14 for fried oreos.

$15 for a funnel cake chicken sandwich.

$25 for a turkey leg.

DC politicians are pricing Texans out of our own state fair.

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— James Talarico (@jamestalarico.bsky.social) October 20, 2025 at 12:39 PM

Why, pray tell, is everything too damn expensive? Economics 101 entering the real world! Unfortunately for the MAGA economists, broad-based tariffs have yet again revealed themselves to be a tax on Americans, not the foreign countries exporting their products to us. In September, Texas State Fair officials confirmed a screenshot circulating on social media saying they will stop giving away free tickets to high school students citing “rising costs, low redemption rates, and increased safety concerns.” There are posts across the internet complaining about unexpectedly high prices at the Texas State Fair, and vendors report items like chocolate costing 71 percent more this year. When the Federal Reserve says they are worried about cutting interest rates because they see signs of inflation creeping back into the economy, these are the kinds of signs they see.

And why is something like chocolate up so much? Because cocoa trees don’t fucking grow here!!! This is why trade exists, like, as a prehistoric principle of mankind that the Republican Party fails to grok even when grok goes woke and tells them this. We can’t grow bananas either, so Trump’s tax on that to try to spur the budding American banana industry is like whacking yourself in the nuts with a hammer in hopes that Tinkerbell will show up and make it feel better. This is all beyond stupid. We do not have words in any form of the human language to convey what a colossal own goal Trump’s entire trade war is for the United States of America.

With farmers at a breaking point and needing bailouts while Trump bails out their competitors in Argentina who replace their vital soybean sales to China–all as inflation hits a major event in Texas–it seems like we are arriving at a pivot point in this saga. We are not condemned to the increasing stagflationary fate around us that is not stagflation yet, but at some point, the rules of stagflation say we will be. Trump got to play around in his sandbox after making his mess in April, as even if he implemented good new trade policies, everyone knows that doesn’t happen overnight and he could jawbone the markets to his heart’s desire. He had time to screw around and promise things like 90 deals in 90 days, and there are signs abounding all around us that his time is running out.

Because vendors need chocolate and people need money to buy that chocolate and between the labor market softening (mainly due to Trump’s draconian immigration policies) growth slowing and more inflation taking root, the roots of stagflation are everywhere you look. If you ask the bottom 50 percent of American net worths, many are already there. Look at how this chart of the 1st to 50th percentiles of Americans’ net worth have dipped and now flatlined since 2023.

FRED graph of bottom 50% income growth stagnating the last few years

Chart via FRED

The vibecession as Kayla Scanlon famously coined it a few years ago is real, and it is being felt at lower incomes, who are more affected by tariffs as every hungover freshman in any economics 101 class could tell you by using basic addition, subtraction and division. The stock market and its wealth effect is responsible for a significant amount of consumer spending by the wealthiest Americans who own most stocks, but this economy only really works when every piston is firing. The Texas State Fair and charts like the above and rising auto defaults and statements from the Fed about inflationary concerns all point to a growing squeeze of people at lower incomes. The lesson of 2008 and The Big Short is that the giant economic conflagration is not caused by the stripper who owns five houses, but by the bankers securitizing her loans and selling them as something they aren’t. But as much as comparisons to 2008 are coded into our view of the economy, they are always pointless because in 2007, no one would have said Lehman Brothers would go under a year later, and the entire point of a crisis is it’s a surprise. What Trump is delivering to us so far does not look like 2008, it looks like the 1970s.

A big part of policymaking is ensuring that our society is set up to withstand any surprises or black swan events like, oh, I don’t know, AI being a bunch of hollow spending on data centers with trillions in bridge loans and a wave of demand that hasn’t arrived yet. The Splinter legend Hamilton Nolan wrote a good blog about the antifragility Trump is coding into everything right now, and how the economy is beginning to suffer similar structural problems to the other core parts of society connected to a government Trump has hollowed out. The Texas State Fair is a big economic weathervane—$83.1 million in operating revenues in 2024—and a big dip in attendance is telling us something. Is it the same story this entire year has told? Who’s to say, all we know is that the rubber is beginning to meet the road in Trump’s trade war as things like turkey legs cost more than double what they did two years ago, and the longer this goes on, the more economic wreckage it will cause. Trump even said so, as he just admitted that what is happening at places like the Texas State Fair “could stand.”

 
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