Does anyone know why hamburger prices went so high and recycling prices are so low?

Cheapest I remember is a McD quarter pounder with cheese for 99 cents.
Strange weather is killing cattle and destroying their feed crops.
Aliens are mutilating them for food.

Government subsidies? recycling and anything green gets money from the government, beef farmers have to compete with ethenol manufacturers (also subsidized) for feed for the cows, increased rent on grazing lands if they are available at all....or something like that.

Ground beef had been 3.49 a pound up until a couple years ago....not its 5.49 for 80/20 and 6.00 for 90/10. Its now expensive for the reasons in my previous post above. It had stayed steady at 3.49 since about 1995 till about 2015

I'm a farmer who raises a small herd of beef a cattle among other things.

What do you imagine it costs to raise an animal up to slaughter weight and how much do you think the final weight of a full grown steer is?

The prices you have become used to over the years were never really the price it cost to get a pound of ground beef into the grocery store. The prices have been fixed because of massive government subsidies to the cattle industry (small farms are not a part of that) so you already paid an advance payment on that hamburger in the form of taxes before you got to the checkout.

A fully grown animal requires at minimum 2 years of feed, water and care. Then it must be trucked to a USDA facility, slaughtered, butchered, cut/ground and packaged before it ever reaches a retailer. A full grown animal will typically yield between 350-400 pounds of steaks, ground beef, stew meat, bones and offal.

I'd ask you to do the math, but that would too difficult for most Americans.

Anything less than $5 a pound for ground beef is a money losing proposition. Roughly $6 per pound is break even. $8 brings a small return, $10 bucks would be profitable.

So complaining about ground beef costs indicates a clear lack of understanding of the investment required to get that beef in the grocery store.

You've all been deceived for so long by the government's ability to skew prices via taxpayer subsidies that you don't understand the real value of anything.

So basically our high taxes are the cost of beef and other things.

perhaps you need the math lesson if 6$ is the break even point, 10$ is a full 40% profit, not markup ....6 x 1.68 = 10$.....If i made 68 cents on every dollar Id feel pretty successful.