Time to fire the president.
A dozen large, Grade A eggs cost an average of $4.15 in the U.S. last month – a nearly 37% increase from the year before – according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s a much larger jump than the 2.5% increase of overall food prices.
The last time that average price was above $4 was two years ago, when the cost for a dozen eggs spiked to a record $4.82.
I mean, Trump’s the guy who goes from store to store and sets prices, right? Or are we now ready to dismiss that simplistic, direct connection out of hand?
In this case, there may be an indirect connection — the price is partly the result of the bird flu.
The egg industry has been impacted by a surge of bird flu cases in recent weeks. More than 13 million egg-laying hens died in December due to the virus – the most of any month last year – according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. And another 3.3 million died in early January.
The losses are a big factor in higher egg prices, said Jada Thompson, a poultry economist at the University of Arkansas who researches how diseases impact markets.
“One of the hard parts is there’s this regional concentration of production,” Thompson said. “And so when a disease is going through and hitting farms in that area, it’s gonna affect multiple farms, and that’s gonna affect the supply of eggs – and that supply then will affect our prices.”
Everything is connected. Do you think censoring the NIH and putting science deniers in charge of our health might have consequences?
Just you wait until the next lockdown. They have a model plan to stop the virus in its tracks.
The virus has an extremely high fatality rate in birds, Sato said. Many birds die within a day or two — so when bird flu is confirmed on a farm, it affects the entire flock.
“Essentially, all of the birds that’s on that site will be depopulated, meaning they’ll all be put down, in order to control the virus and to make sure it’s contained in one area to not spread to other premises,” Sato said.
And if the mutated virus finally makes the leap to humans, Americans abroad will be treated like lepers while the rest of the world introduce social distancing as they wait for the pharmaceutical industries to provide a vaccine.
Meanwhile, the virus will sweep though the US population and RFK JR will issue useless advice.
Silver lining; elderly Republican voters will die like flies.
Oh, I doubt will ever get one of those ever again. Even as the hypothetical disease clogs hospitals and kills millions, they will demand we go to work, spend money, etc.. No masks or social distancing either. What are you, some subservient cuck who’s afraid of a little flu?
I mean, it’s just the flu. Anyone who dies of a flu was weak and unworthy anyway. /S
That’s OK, because.. does the CDC and other agencies that warn people about things like annual flu also report them to farmers? If so everyone should be totally happy that the bird flu with just stop happening magically (or at least no longer be reported to anyone). That will fix it right? Not, like… cause chickens to become an extinct species in the US over the next 4 years when he doubles down on this and stops the sale of anti-biotics to farmers (not that they work really), and anything else that may still result in, “Fake news about vaccines and disease from leaking out.”, or something, right?
But, yeah, what you said Birgerjohansson too.
Going off on a tangent: Trump pardoned a child pornographer, Gregot Kyle Grimsby.
And a drug dealer.
See
.https://youtu.be/2zWmcMcajQI
I pointed this out yesterday so will just repost it.
It is worse than PZ says.
One of the gag orders involves the ongoing bird flu pandemic in Avians.
I’ve seen a lot written about the price of eggs and the availability of eggs.
The explanation is real simple.
The bird flu has killed 100 million chickens in the USA.
“More than 20 million egg-laying chickens in the U.S. died last quarter because of bird flu, data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture shows, marking the worst toll inflicted on America’s egg supply since the outbreak began.”
It is 100 million total since the current outbreak.
Fewer chickens = fewer eggs.
If the Trump regime is going to lower the price of eggs, one of their campaign goals, they are going to have to deal with the bird flu outbreak.
And no, an Executive Order isn’t going to make the bird flu go away.
Yeah, guessing like among domestic terror groups, racists, nazis, etc., he thinks there are some “fine people” among pedos….
This current H5N1 pandemic in Avians, including notably chickens and turkeys is having another obvious effect.
The price of chicken and turkey is going up and there is less available.
I went to the grocery store yesterday and they were out of my preferred forms of staple animal proteins, which are chicken and turkey. The price was also a lot higher.
Fewer turkeys and chickens = higher prices.
I’m sure Trump will fix this with a few tweets, some threats, a few insults towards women and Trans people, and another Executive Order.
This was BTW, why Trump lost his first reelection.
His handling of the novel Covid-19 virus pandemic was incredibly incompetent. He kept saying it was going to be over any day now, while millions got sick and hundreds of thousands died. Remember the refrigerated trucks showing up because there were too many dead bodies to process for burial?
Remember your friends and family members who died from it?
Trump and the GOP obviously haven’t learned anything from their first failure. We are in the middle of another pandemic which so far is only destroying part of our food supply.
And they are ignoring it and beating up on the science and medical people who are the ones who are supposed to fight this pandemic.
If it jumps to humans I expect to see Trump sending out roaming death squads to depopulate affected areas.
1 dozen large eggs weighs 1.5 pounds. At $4.15/dozen, that’s only $2.77/lb. The average price of ground beef is more like $5/lb. Eggs are Still Extremely Cheap for animal-based food products. Of all the things to gripe about, the price of eggs is way, way down on the list.
Agricultural products in general have not been keeping up with inflation for many years. Farmers are getting more and more squeezed over time. Adjusted for inflation, the prices that farmers get for their products are way down from what they were when I was a kid on the farm in the 1970s, and it was very hard to make a living farming then. It’s way past time that the prices of eggs, milk, grain, and general foodstuffs started going up at the farm level.
At No.6 Kagehi, of which he is a proud member of the group.
there are 269 republicans in congress, plus the pres and vp–271 total.
3.3 million chickens died early january. that is about 12,000 chickens per republican.
send each republican 12,000 of the dead chickens so they can see the toll the bird flu is taking.
maybe they will realize how bad the flu could be if it jumped to humans…(yeah, right)
@9 Thanks to vaccine denial and a love of dewormers, the death squads will all be gone by the end of winter. /s
This may sound callous, but a 50% cull may be a wake up call for the survivors unless they toe the line that it’s because a “woke mind virus” instead of the toxic ambulance chasing shenanigans of people like RFK Jr gaining the reins of public health policy. The way things tilted in the past week I don’t know if maybe the victims of the H5N1 (“Trump virus”) cull might be in a better state than the survivors.
Wow rereading that seems really dark!
There may be far less voter turnout and incumbency in the next election at the federal, state, and local level.
timothyeisele@10–
[1] The fact that eggs are cheaper per kilo than meat is irrelevant to the inflationary impact.
[2] For poorer people, inflation in cheap food is far more harmful, so I wouldn’t be so dismissive.
[3] The price of produce in supermarkets has sod-all to do with farmer income. The inflationary excess of the past few years has been largely fuelled by retail chains and food processors gouging consumers on one end and producers on the other, the direct result of having free rein to develop as both oligopolies and oligopsonies. Increases in retail price will not be passed on to the primary producer, and we know this because of the last 25 years of supermarket and food industry practices.
A brief look at what 25 years of screwed up deregulation of the food industry in an openly predatory business environment has done to the Australian dairy industry. The gate price of milk has never been lower and yet the shelf prices are skyrocketing, while dairies are going bankrupt all over the country from being forced to produce milk at or below cost. Meanwhile dairy imports have tripled despite being more expensive than local products because the supermarkets can no longer rely on supply from the local industry. Free market evangelists will insist that this is not possible, and yet here we are. I have nothing but contempt for both the conservative and Labor governments that allowed this to happen, to say nothing of the corporate and competition watchdogs who have failed to act despite it being their sole reason for existing.
Never mind the price of eggs. If the bird flu situation escalates, the price of chicken could escalate wildly. Imagine if that caused numerous KFC’s and Popeye’s chicken restaurants to fail. Chicken nuggets to become unaffordable for common folks. That means pork and beef will have to become more in demand to fill these losses forcing their prices to rapidly rise. This bird flu situation could become a far bigger problem than just egg prices over time.
We still see lots of empty space on grocery store shelves. Now, we see the jump in the price of eggs, poultry becoming scarce, mass deportation means no one to pick vegetables. RFKjr preventing any vaccinations.
I know some don’t take the movie seriously, but we’re getting very close to seeing billboards and online ads reassuring us how good soylent green is.
The article said: all of the birds that’s on that site will be depopulated.
Aside from the elementary school grammatical errors, is that anything like the muskrat space fire works from his spacey ship blowing up being ‘unplanned disassembly’?
timothyeisele @10: At my local Krogers you can’t get chicken eggs of any kind at less than $7.40 a dozen. The cage-free, free-range, and pasture-raised, all at the same price. Only organic pasture-raised are slightly more expensive.