Why the Price of Milk Matters.

In what is undoubtedly one of the more spectacular cases of bad staff work in recent political history, Rudy Giuliani flunked the "Mr. Candidate, what's the going price for a gallon of milk?" pop quiz. (His estimates for the prices of milk and bread were substantially too low, but he was pretty close on the gallon of gas question.) Some bloggers - both conservative and liberal - and some mainstream media commentators have been wondering what the big deal is. Mr. Giuliani, they point out, probably doesn't buy his own milk, and even if he does his mind is probably on other things.

More than a few people, in the comment threads on those various blogs, point out that they don't really know the price either - they pay attention to the final price at the register, but that's about it. That's going to be true for a lot of Americans - especially those who make a decent salary. So why should I expect a Presidential candidate - Democrat or Republican - to be able to recite the prices for milk, eggs, and bread?

At the Navy Exchange convenience store where I usually wind up buying milk, the price is currently about $5.25 per gallon. At the commissary, the price runs a bit cheaper than that. On the civilian market, a bit more unless you're doing most of your shopping at Costco. For me, for Rudy Giuliani, for many Americans, that price comes to less than one percent of our weekly take home pay. For a worker who makes the Hawaii state minimum wage ($7.25/hr), a $5.25 gallon of milk represents about 45 minutes of work.

I am, by any reasonable standard, pretty moderate politically. In the United States today, that makes me a flaming liberal. I'm not the world's largest fan of big government, and I certainly do not want government to invade every aspect of everyone's life. I'm a pretty big fan of personal responsibility, and I think that the American dream really is about pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. But as Al Franken said when he announced his run for the Senate (quoting someone else), you've got to have boots before you can pull yourself up by your bootstraps.

You've got to have boots.

In 2005, more than 28% of the households in the United States had annual incomes of less than $25,000 per year. More than 10% of US households were making less than 12,500 per year. That's the situation in hard cold numbers. In human terms, that means that there are tens of millions of families in the United States where the price of a gallon of milk will be more than 1% of the family take home pay for the week.

There are tens of millions of families in the United States who do not have the luxury of not knowing the price of a gallon of milk. Rudy Giuliani is clearly not in that group, and I don't have a problem with him being rich. But he wants to be President of the United States - all of it, not just the percentage making more than 50k/year.

I don't want the President of the United States to just think about the economy in terms of the Dow, the NASDAQ, pork futures, and inflation rates. I also want the President of the United States to think about the economy in terms of the weekly take home pay for the bottom third of households, the bottom quarter of households, the bottom ten percent of households. I want the President of the United States to think about the economy in terms of what real things cost, and how much work people have to do to be able to buy those little things - like food - that make life easier. I want the President of the United States to be thinking about the future in terms of how to make it easier for the bottom third, quarter, or tenth to buy things like milk.

I don't want the President to know the price of milk because I'm wondering if he put enough cash in his pocket to walk down to the corner market to buy one. I want the President to know the price of milk because I think she should be drinking more of it. I want the President to know what food items cost because I want the President to know how much people are spending on food, and how much they can spend on food.

Personally, I think that someone who's running for office should get that information handed to them by a staffer anytime they visit somewhere. What's the local price of milk? What's the local price of bread? What's the major source of local employment, and what does the local income distribution look like? I want to know that the candidate cares about something more than local trivia, sports statistics, and the names of the party's local precinct captains. I want to know that the candidate is willing to take even a miniscule amount of time to learn something substantive about the lives of the people at the campaign stops.

That's why the price of milk really does matter.