Facing wars and debt, Biden slams ice cream shrinkage

Hours before the Super Bowl, President Joe Biden took to X, formerly known as Twitter, for a critically important message. Within his video announcement, he revealed a major initiative related to a fight that affects Americans of all walks of life: why ice cream containers don’t have more ice cream in them. Seriously.

“When buying snacks for the game, you might have noticed one thing,” Biden remarked. “Sports drink bottles are smaller. [A] bag of chips has fewer chips, but they’re still charging just as much. As an ice cream lover, what makes me the most angry is that ice cream cartons have actually shrunk in size but not in price.” He called this phenomenon “shrinkflation,” and then called on companies “to put a stop to this.”

Thank goodness someone finally has the courage to take on a fight that will define our generation. I am being facetious of course, but is this really what DC officials think every day Americans are worried about? Do they believe that supposed “shrinkflation” of junk food is more important than the country’s mounting and crippling national debt, wars in Ukraine and Gaza, housing unaffordability or inflation far outpacing wage increases?

Clearly there’s a stark disconnect between Americans and officials ensconced within DC’s beltway, and Biden’s new war on shrinking ice cream containers is just befuddling.  

To begin with, much of the political Left of late has seemed to hate junk food—or at least want to heavily regulate it. Nanny state advocate Michael Bloomberg tried banning large soft drinks when he was mayor of New York City. Los Angeles, California, dabbled with restricting fast food joints from opening in certain neighborhoods. Former First Lady Michelle Obama championed a program to limit junk food, and myriad outlets have lambasted the growing food portions at certain restaurants.

Now Biden is incensed that some junk food packages are shrinking, which is an about-face for modern progressives, and apparently he believes that the cause is corporate greed, since the prices are allegedly staying the same, while portions shrink. I haven’t verified whether his claims are accurate, but instead of assuming that greedy c-suite execs are behind some sort of food-price-fixing conspiracy, maybe there is a simpler cause: regular old inflation.

Since Biden took office, the average price of goods has soared by more than 17 percent through December 2023, and while I don’t believe he should bear all of the blame for it, he and his administration has gone to extraordinary lengths to at first downplay it and then avoid any responsibility. Remember when United States Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen called it “transitory”?

Focusing on inflation—for all goods, and not just fast-food items—might be a better choice than complaining about shrinking ice cream containers. In fairness, the Biden administration has acted on inflation—leading to disinflation, or a relatively slower rate of inflation—by tinkering with the Federal Reserve rate. In doing so, officials essentially sacrificed the housing market.

Nevertheless, Biden doesn’t seem to grasp the relationship between prices and inflation rates. Last November, he tweeted, “Let me be clear to any corporation that hasn’t brought their prices back down even as inflation has come down: It’s time to stop the price gouging. Give American consumers a break.”

Respectfully, that’s not how economics works. The inflation rate’s pace can slow, but that doesn’t cause prices to drop. That would require deflation, which presents another set of economic problems that we don’t want to deal with right now. All of the price increases associated with prior inflation rates are already baked into costs, and we are stuck with them.

Americans seem to understand this, and despite some positive economic indicators, people are pessimistic about our economic future. “Americans feel sour about the economy, many say, because their long-term financial security feels fragile and vulnerable to wide-ranging social and political threats,” writes The Wall Street Journal. “Uninspiring leaders at home, running a government widely seen as dysfunctional, have left people without hope that America is up to the challenge of fixing its problems.”

So the issue facing Biden isn’t junk-food packaging, but inflation’s impact on prices and Americans’ lack of faith in our economy and government. Given this, Biden’s focus on junk food and ice cream seems like little more than virtue signaling intended to distract and deflect from the real problems. It is going to take a lot more than threatening the ice cream man to fix those.