A family of four in Broome County, New York spent roughly $180 a week on groceries in 2019. Today that same cart, same store, same brands, same meals, costs closer to $280. That is not a rounding error. That is one hundred dollars a week that used to go toward a car payment, a heating bill, a child’s activity, a small savings account. It has been quietly extracted, and most of the political conversation about it has been a argument about who to blame.
This piece is not that argument. It is something older and, we think, more useful: an explanation.
A Letter From 1787
On November 1, 1787, a writer using the name Brutus, believed to be New York jurist Robert Yates, published the sixth of what would become sixteen essays arguing against ratification of the proposed Constitution. He was not against the republic. He was against a specific architectural decision: giving the federal government unlimited power to tax and spend.
He wrote:
“The power to lay and collect taxes is the most important of any power that can be granted. It connects with it almost all other powers, or at least will in process of time draw all others after it… A government which has the power to lay taxes without limit, and to borrow money without limit, will in time draw to itself all the wealth of the community.”
He then predicted, with precision that feels almost uncomfortable at this distance, that this power would produce two effects. First, the federal government would spend beyond its means, creating a debt that citizens would bear not through any vote of their own but through the depreciation of the money they held. Second, as federal economic power centralized, private economic power would follow, concentrating in the hands of those with the access and resources to navigate and influence federal institutions.
He was describing, in 1787, the mechanism behind your grocery bill in 2026.
The Mechanism, Plainly Stated
The cost of living crisis has not one cause but three that operate together, each amplifying the others.
The first is monetary. Between 2020 and 2022, the federal government authorized roughly $6 trillion in emergency spending. The Federal Reserve expanded its balance sheet from $4 trillion to nearly $9 trillion. The supply of dollars in circulation grew faster than the supply of goods those dollars could buy. This is not a partisan observation, it is the definition of inflation, and it was the predicted consequence of the federal spending power Brutus warned about. The debt now exceeds $35 trillion. The annual interest payment alone exceeds $1 trillion, more than the entire defense budget. Every dollar spent servicing that debt is a dollar taxed, invisibly, from every American who holds dollars, buys groceries, pays rent.
The second is consolidation. Four companies, Tyson, JBS, Cargill, and National Beef, process roughly 85 percent of the beef in the United States. A similar consolidation has occurred across pork, poultry, dairy, and grain. This did not happen by accident. It happened over decades through mergers that federal regulators approved, agricultural policies that favored scale over sustainability, and trade agreements that restructured global supply chains in ways that benefited consolidators at the expense of independent producers.
The farmer in Delaware County who raises cattle receives less per pound than he did twenty years ago, adjusted for his costs. The family in Binghamton pays more per pound than they did twenty years ago. The distance between those two facts is occupied by a small number of very large companies. This is precisely the aristocratic consolidation of economic power that Centinel, another Anti-Federalist writer, warned would follow the centralization of federal authority.
The third is regulatory capture. The agencies created to check consolidated power, the USDA, the FTC, the FDA, have, over decades, been shaped by the industries they were designed to regulate. This is not corruption in the criminal sense. It is structural: the people with the deepest expertise in an industry are the people who came from that industry or who will return to it. The result is that federal power, rather than serving as a check on private consolidation, has often served as its enabler, approving mergers, writing favorable rules, providing subsidies that flow disproportionately to the largest operators.
What Both Parties Have Gotten Wrong
The political conversation about the cost of living has sorted itself into two familiar positions, each capturing something real while missing the structure.
One side points to corporate greed. This is not wrong, profit margins at the major food processors expanded significantly during the inflation period, suggesting that companies used the cover of supply chain disruption to price beyond their cost increases. But greed has always existed. What changed is the structural environment that allows it to operate without competitive check.
The other side points to government spending and regulation as the sole cause, implying the solution is simply less of both. This too captures something real, monetary expansion and spending without limit are genuinely inflationary, but it ignores the role that federal regulatory structure has played in enabling consolidation, and the fact that less federal engagement without structural reform simply removes the already-imperfect check on private power.
Brutus understood that these two forces, concentrated government power and concentrated private economic power, are not opposites. They are partners. One enables the other. You cannot address the price of groceries by arguing only about government or only about corporations, because the problem is the relationship between them.
What the Founders’ Critics Actually Proposed
The Anti-Federalists were not anarchists. They did not want no government. They wanted structural constraints on how power could accumulate, limits on federal taxing and spending, stronger protections for state economic autonomy, a commerce power genuinely directed at preventing monopoly rather than enabling it.
Many of their specific proposals failed. But their analysis was correct. And the solutions that flow from that analysis are structural, not a new program, not a new regulation layered on top of existing capture, but a rethinking of the federal government’s relationship to economic power.
What that requires, concretely: antitrust enforcement with genuine independence from the industries being regulated. Agricultural policy restructured to support independent producers rather than industrial consolidators. Monetary discipline, not as ideology but as constitutional obligation. And representatives who understand the mechanism, not just the symptoms, and are willing to name the structure rather than the villain of the week.
The Bill You Are Actually Paying
The hundred dollars missing from that grocery cart every week is not a mystery. It is the sum of monetary inflation, market consolidation, and regulatory capture, three mechanisms that Brutus and his colleagues saw nascent in the Constitution’s architecture and warned about in plain language two hundred and forty years ago.
They were not alarmists. They were architects reading a blueprint and identifying load-bearing weaknesses. The house has been standing. But the cracks they identified have been spreading, and the people feeling them most directly are the ones who cannot afford to move.
The cost of everything is high because the structure that governs everything has drifted far from the equilibrium its critics demanded. Understanding that is not the whole solution. But it is the beginning of one, and it is, we think, what honest civic journalism exists to provide.
Brutus, Letter VI, November 1, 1787. Available in full at the Avalon Project, Yale Law School. Centinel, Letter I, October 5, 1787. Available in full at the Library of Congress.