They’re Calling It ‘The Value Meal Wars’: Taco Bell Enters the Fray with New $7 Deal

For reasons we often forget, the Founding Fathers would have hated fast food.

On Thursday, Taco Bell announced a new $7 Luxe Cravings Box, which features a “Chalupa Supreme, Beefy 5-Layer Burrito, Double Stacked Taco, chips and nacho cheese sauce, and a medium drink.”

The new low-price offering signaled Taco Bell’s entrance into what CNN called the “summer of fast food value meal wars.”

All told, the Luxe Cravings Box amounts to a 55 percent discount compared to what each item costs separately.

The value meal constitutes Taco Bell’s response to what CNN euphemistically called “economic pressures.” That is the establishment media’s way of referring to the catastrophe of “Bidenomics” under President Joe Biden.

Taylor Montgomery, Taco Bell’s chief marketing officer, subtly acknowledged Biden’s signature inflation without mentioning the president by name.

“We believe that fast food should be a luxury that everyone can afford everyday,” Montgomery said.

In other words, under Biden, Americans have struggled to afford even fast food — let alone real food.

With that in mind, Taco Bell has now followed other price-conscious chains in appealing to a cash-strapped public.

In May, for instance, Wendy’s responded to Bidenomics with a major promotion featuring 45 to 50 chicken nuggets for $14.99. [grafs 1-3]

Last week, McDonald’s announced its own $5 Meal Deal. For that affordable price, customers can get either a McDouble or a McChicken sandwich plus four-piece Chicken McNuggets, small fries and small soft drink.

McDonald’s and other chains have struggled not only with Bidenomics but with catastrophic economic policies in liberal California.

This story serves as a useful reminder that many Americans have — at best — an incomplete understanding of the freedom their ancestors intended for them.

Those who enjoy fast food, of course, should have the freedom to consume it. Furthermore, they should do so without having to endure moralizing snobbery from their affluent neighbors.

But if the mass of ordinary Americans choose fast food because they cannot afford anything healthier, that is a different matter altogether. In fact, it means that the republic the Founders envisioned does not exist.

In Query XIX of “Notes on the State of Virginia,” Thomas Jefferson explained the relationship between land cultivation and freedom.

“Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue,” Jefferson wrote.

In other words, because they grow their own food, only farmers enjoy actual independence.

By contrast, those engaged in manufacturing or trade, who depend for their livelihood on what Jefferson called the “casualties and caprice of customers,” can never be free. And that kind of economic serfdom makes true republican self-government impossible.

“Dependance begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition,” Jefferson wrote.

The tiny handful of non-woke, non-Marxist historians have understood this for a long time. In fact, to cite one example, Drew McCoy’s “The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America” showed how Jefferson’s policies reflected his and other Founders’ beliefs that a republic could not exist without independent landowners capable of feeding themselves and their families.

Thus, the Founding Fathers would have hated fast food, though not necessarily on its merits. After all, who can say that a man with the appetites of Benjamin Franklin would not have enjoyed a Chalupa Supreme?

No, they would have hated fast food because of what it revealed about the fate of their republican experiment. Why, they would have asked, can Americans not afford their own land on which to grow food?

Taco Bell and other fast-food chains did not destroy the republic. Instead, they have merely responded to conditions that make actual freedom impossible — conditions exacerbated by the nightmare of Bidenomics.