Are You Ready For $6 to $8 a Gallon Milk?

Posted by Brian

While Congress and the President pussyfoot around with the "fiscal cliff", there is another cliff which consumers may go over in very short order - the "Dairy cliff".  The decades-old dairy subsidies (the government interfering in the free market) are set to go away, and if Congress does not pass a farm bill by January 1, three days away, consumers could see a serious spike in the milk they purchase.
Who would've thought that your morning cereal would become a luxury?
I hope you like your coffee black!

The other, other cliff: With no farm bill, milk prices set to soar 
POSTED AT 2:01 PM ON DECEMBER 28, 2012 BY ERIKA JOHNSEN

A few weeks back, Department of Agriculture Secretary Vilsack lamented the declining influence of rural America and the agricultural lobby’s inability to push next year’s farm bill through Congress. What he conspicuously failed to mention, of course, is that the farm bill and the USDA’s many decades-old agricultural programs in general (numbering in the hundreds and ranging from direct cash payouts to trade barriers) primarily benefit large agribusinesses and hardly ever the small, struggling family farms they claim they are trying to “protect.”

In reality, all of these subsidies only help special niche interests, distort free-market signals, provide rent-seeking channels to industries that neither need nor merit it, create virtual taxpayer-sponsored rackets, and come at the cost of a net drain on our economy.  The dairy industry is just one example of the utter convolution perpetuated by the federal government deigning to award market-distorting special treatment, on behalf of what they deem to be ‘fairness’ and at taxpayers’ expense. Sorry to throw another “cliff” metaphor at you, but this is happening:
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