Why Milk Costs More Than Gas

Nicholas von Hoffman

The other day milk was selling in a New England supermarket at $4.79 a gallon. Down the street, regular gasoline was going for about $3.04 a gallon.

One of the factors driving up the cost of milk is the ethanol stampede. Ethanol, as we all have been taught to believe by now, will bring us “energy independence” and lessen global warming with no change in the way we live–unless we happen to be a small child in a household with a limited budget.

Children from low-income families are either going to have to accustom themselves to drinking gasoline or learn to sing “No Milk Today.”

American ethanol is made from corn, and the more corn we use to feed our cars, the more expensive is the corn left over for our livestock. Ergo, “No Milk Today.”

If ethanol we must have, we could import it from Brazil, where they can make it cheaper from sugar cane than Americans can make it from corn. But Brazilian ethanol, thanks to the agribusiness lobby and a 54-cent-per-gallon import tariff, is kept out of the country.

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