12 gallons of milk was my last straw. CNN’s widely mocked report may have broken me. It seemed like only minutes after the clip on a Texas family struggling with that impact of inflation went viral, it was blasted out by the House Republicans on Twitter:
The report suggests a 40% rise in milk prices over (presumably) the past year. Not only is that not true, but prices are down, in nominal terms from a high in 2007. To be fair, it’s pretty clear some prices are going up. But so are wages. Overall household debts have fallen, as well. So I don’t mock the family or their milk consumption. I mock CNN for holding up these outliers of cartoonish proportions as a typical, representative middle-class family. And I resent how infrequently they report on actually food-insecure families. CNN could have interviewed people going in and out of a Kroger about how they feel about the stimulus checks as they get their groceries. The could have stopped to talk to a clerk or bagger at the store. Instead, they pre-manufactured a shopping trip using a family whose situation wasn’t at all representative.
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