Trump and Greedflation Take Egg

The reason why Trump take egg has taken root is because much of the election was fought over egg prices. Sure, they were a proxy for the overall dissatisfaction with higher prices driven by what the Wall Street Journal even calls “greedflation,” but eggs are a staple and making them prohibitively expensive or difficult to even acquire has repercussions that reverberate across the economy and the culture.

Senator Elizabeth Warren wrote a letter to Trump last month asking about his “plan to lower food prices” given that Trump himself said “I won on groceries.” Trump has not done anything to address one of the main issues in the election, because it requires actual governance to do it, and he’s only interested in letting Elon Musk be president while stripping the government for parts and selling it off to the highest bidder.

But as easy as it is to just say Trump take egg and call it a day, he’s not the main problem here. Greedflation is very real, and as Sen. Warren pointed out, the CEO of the country’s largest egg producer, Cal-Maine, “acknowledged that the company’s higher-than-estimated net income for Q2 ‘reflect[s] higher market prices, which have continued to rise this fiscal year as supply levels of shell eggs have been restricted.’” Cal-Maine take egg too.

The avian flu crisis and the potential pandemic it could bring are obviously part of this dynamic, but using it to explain the entire rise in egg prices is exactly what Cal-Maine wants you to do. Since it hit the United States in 2022, the avian flu has infected or killed 162 million birds, and Cal-Maine has reported the loss of 2.6 million chickens. Expana, which tracks egg prices, estimates that roughly 15 percent of America’s egg-laying chickens have been killed in the last four months as egg prices have risen 255 percent.

It doesn’t take a math whiz to see that those figures are out of whack. A 15 percent reduction in egg production should lead to higher prices, but anything more than around a 15 percent rise in prices raises questions beyond the supply and demand curves (post-edit note: as some have pointed out, eggs are an inelastic product, which means that their price should rise more in this instance, how much is up for economists to argue about, but I’ll still bet the under on 255 percent). It’s clear as day that companies like Cal-Maine which have disproportionate control over America’s egg supply are raising prices far more than the restriction in supply dictates they should, simply because they can. Who’s going to stop them, after all? The guy selling U.S. citizenship for $5 million? Please. We have been left all alone with corporate predators who are willing to bankrupt the populace for a three percent increase in year-over-year earnings.

This is not a recent development under Trump either. In 2023, a jury awarded $17.7 million to Kraft and other producers over their lawsuit alleging that Cal-Maine and Rose Acre Farms had artificially raised prices on eggs. Farm Action, a nonprofit that fights for smaller farms against the corporate goliaths putting them out of business, wrote a letter to FTC Chair Lina Khan in 2023 asserting that Cal-Maine is perpetrating “apparent price gouging, price coordination, and other unfair or deceptive acts or practices.” This month, Federal Trade Commissioner Alvaro Bedoya even wrote that “there’s a person in the government who could flick his pen and start an investigation into what the hell is going on with eggs. I know there’s enough smoke that it’s worth figuring out if there’s a fire.”

One of the dynamics throughout our increasingly fragile economy propped up by the stock market’s wealth effect is that greedflation has run rampant since 2020. The early days of the pandemic brought a massive global supply shock, raising prices everywhere as inflation ran to its peak around nine percent. Once inflation abated, prices remained sticky, as many corporate behemoths outpaced their earnings expectations on the back of elevated prices that Americans across the political spectrum attest to immiserating their lives. As the WSJ noted in their writeup defending greedflation, “inflation may be higher as a result of corporations flexing their pricing muscle. But it is probably also the reason why the recession everyone expects always seems to be six months away.”

Corporations can flex their pricing muscle in large part because there are monopolies and oligopolies like Cal-Maine everywhere you look. This is one of the main reasons why previous iterations of America fought tooth and nail to establish antitrust laws that allowed the government to break up monopolies. After breaking up Microsoft in the 1990s, both parties tacitly agreed that antitrust issues were to be put on the back-burner, and they only became salient again when Lina Khan took over Joe Biden’s FTC. The egg crisis has a lot of roots, but the primary one is a nearly thirty yearlong bipartisan commitment to empowering monopolies and oligopolies in every corner of the American economy.

So yes, Trump take egg, but the skyrocketing egg prices and lack of availability is part of a larger story about rampant corporate greed destroying people’s lives. Major American companies don’t see us as equal players in the American project, they look at the populace as a group of people to be exploited. Mega corporations leverage their political power to further protect their illegal monopolies and oligopolies, and then turn around and literally make regular Americans pay the price for their unchecked greed. Blame Trump for refusing to lift a finger to give Americans our precious eggs back while further empowering the monopolists, but don’t lose sight of the fact that the root of the problem lies in the greedy boardrooms at places like Cal-Maine where these cretins would rather let Americans starve to death than cut into their own artificially-inflated profit margins.