The can of ravioli
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The can of ravioli is a domestic confession John Kiriakou volunteered on 19 November 2025, and the closest thing in the corpus to a first-person account of what inflation feels like to him.

The polling problem

The context was a new poll showing Democrats far ahead in a generic congressional ballot, and one finding inside it: that 57 per cent of Americans said they wanted prices to drop more than they cared about any other issue. The host's objection was technical, prices are not going to drop, cannot drop, and should not, because that is deflation, and he then put the alternative to Kiriakou as a question: was not what Americans really needed higher incomes?

Kiriakou agreed with the economics, "oh, absolutely", and immediately identified the gap between what was needed and what was wanted. "But I think they're not thinking about higher incomes. They want prices to go back to what they were a year ago or two years ago." And then, in unison with the host: "It's not going to happen."

The confession

Having established that the public's wish is impossible, he then admitted to sharing it, and produced the evidence.

"I'll admit to everybody, and I'm not proud to admit it, but I really like raviolis. Like, just right out of the can. I don't even heat them up. I just open the can and eat them out of the can."

The rule he attaches to this is absolute and, by his own account, not entirely rational. "I don't know why, but I just have this thing where I refuse to pay more than 99 cents for a can of raviolis. And so I'll just wait until they're on sale for 99 cents. They're usually a buck and a quarter."

$2.49

"So I went to the grocery store the other day and the raviolis are $2.49. Two forty-nine for a can of lousy raviolis. I'm not going to do it. I'm not going to pay it. I won't spend the money."

And then the concession that gives the anecdote its point: "I want everything to come down to where it was a year ago, too."

Why he tells it

The function of the story in the argument is to deny himself an exemption. Kiriakou has just explained why the electorate's demand is economically incoherent; he then demonstrates that he holds the same incoherent demand, in the same aisle, over the same kind of purchase. The host's response was to agree, "me too", before returning to the position both had already stated: that the solvable variable is wages, not prices, because "higher prices are not a solvable problem, because of the way that the system is currently set up."

See also

- The Arlington house
- John Kiriakou
