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

James Talarico, 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.

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$14 for fried oreos.

$15 for a funnel cake chicken sandwich.

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• The Base Case for Trump’s Economy Is Stagflation

$25 for a turkey leg.

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

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— James Talarico (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 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 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.

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 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, admitted that what is happening at places like the Texas State Fair “could stand.”