LIKE a good American, I have endeavoured to remain ignorant of the "fiscal cliff" and its perils. When confronted with stories about tense negotiations in Washington, I have let my consciousness ramble freely over more agreeable subjects, such as debt peonage or vivisection. But then a local news outlet burst my cozy envelope of oblivion with a powerful spot about the prospect of $8 gallons of milk. This I could not fathom. How? No agreement on taxes and spending and, bang, just like that, $8 milk? And now we've plummeted over this "cliff". How will Americans afford to make their cereal delicious?

First, we should ask how milk could conceivably double in price through legislative inaction? I will admit that I am not quite convinced that American lactophiles will really feel the pinch. According to a Reuters report:






It's this "trigger a chain reaction" bit that gives me pause. What's the government going to do with all that dear milk? Float a battleship in it? Why not sell it back to distributors at the prevailing market price? Or cut checks to farmers for the difference between the price-per-gallon they got at market and the price mandated by the antiquated price-support scheme? Better still, the government can simply refuse to buy milk at ridiculously jacked-up prices. If Barack Obama can sidestep the legislative process and implement central elements of the DREAM Act through adminstrative fiat, if he can arrogate to his office the unilateral power to determine who will die designated a "terrorist", surely he can have the USDA make an ad hoc rule on the prevailing price floor for dairy. In these latter days of enbridled executive power, if the executive is determined not to be legally obligated to do something, it isn't. 

The idea that the USDA will be left utterly powerless to avoid buying up all the milk at outrageous prices, helpless not to punish consumners with extortionate milk prices, in the absence of a new farm bill is so fantastic it's impossible not to suspect that the adminstration has been playing the media for fools in order to foster further popular disdain for the "do-nothing" Congress. The Washington Posts' own piece on the ticking time-bomb of milk prices contains the sort of vague language one expects from a bit of a snow-job:



Who says "by more than $3 a gallon"? Whose "hopes are diminishing". Tom Vilsack's? That the USDA "is exploring all options for heading off a mess" prepares us not be surprised when it inevitably finds one. Surely the Post's intrepid journalists, if not Houston's Fox affiliate's, might have done something to get the secretary of agriculture to say more about these options, instead of so readily dancing to his tune.