Mr. Galli has been trying to cut back without making life worse for his two daughters, who are 6 years and 18 months old, including switching to a cheaper brand of diapers and racing to spend his Argentine pesos before their value disintegrates even further.

“I prefer to tell you the uncomfortable truth rather than a comfortable lie,” he said in his inaugural address, adding this past week that he wanted to end the country’s “model of decline.”

The economic turmoil paved the way to the presidency for Mr. Milei, a political outsider who had spent years as an economist and television pundit railing against what he called corrupt politicians who destroyed the economy, often for personal gain.

The previous leftist government had used complicated currency controls, consumer subsidies and other measures to inflate the peso’s official value and keep several key prices artificially low, including for gas, transportation and electricity.

With the chronic high inflation, labor unions often negotiate large raises to try to keep up, yet those wage increases are quickly eaten up by sharp price hikes.

“I always say that we are at university, and every day we sit for a difficult exam, every five minutes,” said Roberto Nicolás Ormeño, an owner of El Gauchito, a small empanada shop in downtown Buenos Aires.

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