There's more to it than just the one sentence
I can’t speak for all of the other posters, but I was just poking fun at what I thought was a poorly worded sentence. Maybe the author assumed that there were a lot of readers whose recollection of what median signifies would come back to them when they read that sentence. But why didn’t he also take into account all of the readers who slept through high school math and just write
Half of all American families report annual income of less than $56,000, and 60% report incomes of less than $70,000.
It might seem like a huge kerfuffle over a mere piffle, but I think there is bigger bone to pick with this story than just the one sentence. The more I thought about the article the more I felt like it was crappy journalism built around a BLS press release and some halfass research.
Given the fact that Kevin Hall is a reporter specializing in economics I would have expected better. It read more like he pulled up the latest CPI report from the BLS and liberally tossed around some stats. Then, he followed it with one paragraph that listed all of the possible reasons why food has recently increased in price. He stopped off at the local grocery on the way home and got a quote from a woman living on a fixed income and he was done. Almost, because that last paragraph seems a little out of place and not well written. The more I read the last paragraph the more I wonder if he just tacked it on to meet a minimum number of words requirement for the article.
He really did the story a disservice and glossed over a lot of factors – or ignored them completely.
For example, the price of milk.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics said in its June inflation report that egg prices are 19.5 percent higher than they were in June 2006. Over the same period, according to the department's consumer price index, whole milk was up 13.3 percent…
So, milk prices were up, a lot, in June 2007 vs June 2006. But what did the prices look like before that?
The price was at a multi-year low in June 2006. In fact, in 2004 the National Milk Producers Federation acted on what they felt was 25 years of low prices (2002-2003 prices were the lowest since 1979) and started paying dairy farmers to “retire” cattle from their herds. A retired dairy cow is also known as a quarter-pounder with cheese (or in France, a Royale with cheese). The group paid farmers to slaughter 35,000 cows in 2004 and 52,000 more in 2005. I don’t have more recent figures, but their 2006 annual report indicates that the program continues and they even calculate how much the herd retirement program adds to the cost of milk. Plus, the NMPF pays farmers a subsidy for exporting dairy products overseas (I’m not sure why). In fact, the export assistance program removed more milk from the US markets than the first year of herd retirements.
This same organization, while paying their members to reduce the means of production in order to raise prices, was also hard at work demanding immigration “reform” so their members could continue to have access to lower paid illegal immigrant labor. Oh yeah, there were several paragraphs that I didn’t bother to decipher that boasted of their success in getting Congress to “simplify” pricing regulations to again boost the price that their members received for the milk they sell. Which seems prove wrong the statement blaming some of the price increase on "tougher immigration enforcement” – at least in the case of milk prices.
He doesn’t mention the increase in cheese consumption, or the fact that overall consumption of dairy products in 2006 (latest figures) was the highest it has been since 1987.
Nor does he mention how the pricing structure in the grocery stores tends to enhance price increases and negate price drops. Consumer Union did a study several years ago of the price of milk in California and found
“…there is an ever-widening spread between the retail price of milk and the farm price due to the cumulative effect of years of continual increases by milk retailers whenever the farm price goes up even a penny, and limited decreases in the retail price when the farm price drops.”
It wasn't a great story, it wasn't researched very extensively, it was a puff piece overall and the last paragraph was crap.
