Let them eat burgers! Austrian chancellor says low-income families should eat at McDonald’s

It's not healthy, but it's cheap: a hamburger at McDonald's — €1.40, if I buy fries with it, €3.50.

3.50€ for a meal isn't cheap and nothing a poor person can afford on a regular basis. I can cook a great meal for under 2€ that doesn't consist of trash. What a detached asshole.

McDonald's is not cheap food, it's fast food. I don't expect this cunt to know the difference.
- Same in all Europe. Not cheap for the quality. Cooking at home the same burger is cheaper with better ingredients
- Same here in Lithuania. McDonalds is way too expensive for people on a tight budget and what you get for the price is disappointing too. It's cheaper and more delicious to make some burgers at home (which aren't so dry that you must wash down every bite with a sip of Coke) or just to get a street kebab (which is slightly more expensive but actually fills you for the entire day and is full of meat and veggies).
The 1,40 burgers are barely enough to satiate a child, even with fries.
A menu that can fill an adult, that's 13-14€ easily. And that's still just one meal.
The quality 3 meals a day I consume and make at home average 5€ per portion. resulting in 450€ food budget per person per month, I generally go for white label products if the quality is good enough.
That's 900€ a month for 2 people for food alone (this was 300ish before COVID).
850-1000€ for entry level 1 bedroom rent here, brings us to 1750-1900€ a month for a roof and food, another 75-100 for electricity (and then you have to be very usage conscious) brings us to 1825-2000€ a month, add required insurance (fire/health/accidents) for another 50-100€ brings us to 1875-2100€ a month.
Now, a phone and internet sub are pretty much a requirement these days, so say the cost of a cheap phone, internet and gsm abbo combine to be another 50€ a month per person.
So we're at 1975-2200€ a month to cover the very basic living expenses for a 2 person household.
You'd need to have one person with a decent wage or two people working minimum wage to barely get by.
Any surprise or extra cost and you're in the red.
Eating McDonnalds to cover breakfast, lunch and dinner every day, you'd need over 2000€ for food alone.
- The quality 3 meals a day I consume and make at home average 5€ per portion
  That’s really very high, are you guessing or did you actually work it out for an average day?
That's not even enough to satiate you. For that you need to buy a menu which is about 10€ here in Germany. That's not cheap at all.
If I could afford almost 4 quid per meal I'd be laughing! Think of all the nice food I could eat!
We grow all of our vegetables for most of the year. Potatoes, carrots, leeks, onions, tomatoes, cucumbers, lettuce, beetroot, lots of berries for jams, etc etc. I don't know how we'd manage without that.
We live in the outskirts of a major city in England, not a stereotypically poor blackwater somewhere. This is how bad things are these days.
What can a banana cost?
As of July 2023, the price of a Big Mac (just the sandwich) in the US is $5.58 (€5.27). https://www.statista.com/statistics/274326/big-mac-in@dex-global-prices-for-a-big-mac/
According to Google that's about $5 Canadian. The avegage burger combo at McDonald's in my area is about $12. $15 if you upsize.
Not that eating healthier is much cheaper.
Exactly. Not only is it not cheap on a regular basis, but it isn't even that much food from my experience at the cheaper end of McDonalds.
You'd be far better off cooking your own food if you have the time, but the problem is a lot of these people are so busy working their arses off to stay afloat that they don't have that time.
- Those 1€ (1.40 in Austria apparently) burgers are barely enough to satiate a child, if combined with fries. They are nowhere near enough to feed an adult.
3,50€ is really cheap in my country. But our grocery and restaurants prices are among the worse ones

Except for the fact that she never said any of that, it was Rousseau
It's almost like that's what the first line of the title is implying as well.

"So what does it mean that a child doesn't get a hot meal in Austria? Do you know what the cheapest hot meal in Austria is? It's not healthy, but it's cheap: a hamburger at McDonald's — €1.40, if I buy fries with it, €3.50. Now someone is seriously claiming that we live in a country where parents can't afford this meal for their child," he said.

"If I have too little money, I go to work more," he added in the video, which was filmed during a wine-and-cheese event near Salzburg — with no burgers in sight — his conservative People's Party confirmed to Plus24.

i hope he chokes to death on a piece of rotten cheese in his wine cave

Even disregarding this being a horrible choice for your child's nutrition that's a pretty bad deal, you could get much more food by buying cheap brands in the supermarket.
This guy is amazingly out of touch, normally conservative EU politicians have the sense to refrain from such statements even if probably most of them believe the same.
- lol, in my experience French conservative politicians are equally out of touch. They're bourgeois fucks, they have no idea what a bus ticket costs. See this compilation from a few years ago
  https://www.francetvinfo.fr/politique/pain-au-chocolat-a-10-centimes-ticket-de-metro-a-4-euros-quand-les-politiques-vivent-dans-un-autre-monde_1887529.html
  They live on another plane of existence, they can't do anything themselves so it's not surprising they don't know the price of things
€3.50 every day would be €108.50 per month for a single person eating a single meal per day
that's way more than i spend at the supermarket and i eat two meals per day that are way more filling and actually healthy lmao
- I can almost assure you it was one of those gatherings of pretentious snobs that extend their pinky when sipping from their Château Latour.
If I have too little money, I go to work more
Something tells me this guy has never had a real job in his life

Nobody in our country voted for that tone deaf asshole either. He was just "stepped in" as an interim after our prior catastrophe of a chancellor stepped down (Sebastian Kurz - He also made it to international media for his corruption).

Before representing our country as chancellor, this piece of shit was minister of the interior. - while being in this position he was just as useless as now. Words cannot describe how much I loathe this guy.

I personally couldnt care less if he was leading the party at the last elections or not. Nehammer is prime ÖVP, his politics is a perfect example of what you get when you vote for this party.

Are you enjoying your capitalism?

Did they go looking doe the most smug, I'm-an-asshole expression possible for that guy, or does he just look like that?

Resting Bougface

Idiot. That's neither healthy nor sustainable. What's his vision for his country?

Bleeding it dry? There was a thread in Mastodon recently proving there's a massive supermarket cartel driving prices in Austria higher than in surrounding countries and the government took the side of the supermarkets.
- Do you have a link to that? Would love to know more.
The vision of his party is to keep everything the same, they're conservatives
- Except when it comes to businesses, or religion, usually.
- Too bad the world keeps changing, huh?
It's also nowhere near that cheap.
McD is hella expensive, especially if you have to live of of it.
A 8-10€ basic menu is good to fill in a single meal, but while having a ton of calories, doesn't satiate enough to count even as a full meal (which is on purpose so you order more). At my local prices, you're looking at 13-15€ minimum, to have a satiating meal out of McDonnalds.

What on earth happened to all the small businesses in my "poor" rural village? Oh right, that pedestrian unfriendly stroad next to the freeway with the Walmart and all the fast food restaurants sucking up the village's life force happened.

"Communism is when no food"

Capitalism:

Who tf can afford to eat at McDonalds, have you seen their prices lately?

His opinion used to be much more widespread 10 or 15 years ago. Now poor people can't even eat fast food without being judged for wasting money.
He's not just a capitalist pig, he's an out of touch capitalist pig.
I think most people can afford to eat at McDonald's.
- I can afford it but with the current prices it makes no sense - last time I walked out with a $12 total. There's a whole lot of better places to eat for that much
- Why would I spend $50 on a hamburger, I can do more than one to myself with $10

mcdonalds is not cheap though

Fast food is now treated as a "expensive night out" for us. It's like $30 for standard cost.
- Crazy how fucked the economy has gotten pretty much everywhere lol
- And after the delivery services started taking over, it's not even fast. At my local place anything other than nuggets and fries takes 20-30min minimum.

His face is so incredibly punchable

He's the kind of guy who looks like he could use a quick session of his teeth being on fire.
He looks so smug that I'd be afraid I might get some on my hand.

This is another way to tell people to go kill themselves.

Basically yes.

Not sure how things are in Austria but where I live fast food is really expensive for someone strapped for cash

The sentiment remains disgusting no matter how factually accurate it is.
"I only have a few dollars to feed my children"
"Oh fuck have you tried giving it to billionaires?“

Low-income families should eat long pig taken from the rich.

Is McDonald's cheap anywhere other than the US? In the US, there's a bunch of promotions that drive costs way down...

Yeah, I always heard in my youth that McDonald's is the poor's restaurant (in the US at least). However it was never really the case e.g. in Hungary. It was always average priced at best. You can eat far better for far less in every moderate-sized town.
- In the US you can get a burger and fries for $2 with their in-app promotions. On a per-calorie basis, it's actually very competitive with cooking yourself.
Is McDonald's even cheap in the US?