Who is the real Breck Girl? (Picture: http://nypost.com)

Gaffe-machine Hillary Clinton, with each passing day resembling more a poorly programmed robot and beginning to make Joe Biden look as elegant as Fred Astaire, has her newest campaign advisor to thank for her latest birdbrained move. John “Breck Girl” Edwards, a presidential candidate himself in 2004 and 2008 (and the Democrat Party’s VP nominee in 2004), has joined the Clinton campaign as a hair style advisor, and according to sources within Clinton’s camp, it was Edwards’s idea for Clinton “to put part of Bergdorf Goodman on lockdown on Friday to get a $600 haircut at the swanky John Barrett Salon.” When asked for comment, Marian Etz, Professor of Political Science at Champale University in Trenton, New Jersey, and Director of the Spiro Agnew Institute for Clean Politics, told Bud Fox News:

This move has Edwards’s heavy-handed fingerprints all over it. But his hiring makes a lot of sense because they’re actually very similar politicians. Just like Edwards did with his Two Americas theme, Hillary is running a class warfare campaign. And in both cases, they’re as credible as Miley Cyrus doing a public service announcement for the American Library Association. Of course, there’s also a potential similarity- Edwards was arrested for breaking federal campaign contribution laws, and if classified information keeps popping up on Hillary’s private emails, then she might want to consult with the Breck Girl’s lawyer because he got Edwards a mistrial.  

Hillary’s $600 haircut offers, as our pedantic President likes to say, a teachable moment since it introduces the ugly specter of inflation and raises an important question: Has the price for a political diva’s haircut increased significantly in the last two decades? Back in 1993, Bill Clinton shut down two runways at Los Angeles Airport for two hours while hairstylist Cristophe Schatteman worked on the Debauchee-in-Chief’s coiffure to the tune of $200. And of course, Edwards, in a paroxysm of self-indulgence only a Kardashian could understand, opted for two …yes, two…$400 haircuts from Torrenueva Hair Designs of Beverly Hills during his 2007 run for the White House. For an analysis, Bud Fox News‘ business analyst Petty Cash spoke with Abderazzaq S. Abdeulhafafeeth, Professor of Mathematics at Eastern Kentucky State Normal School and Teachers College and author of the award-winning children’s math book, Which Has More Zeros? A Vigintillion or the Clinton’s Bank Account? Learning How to Count. They used the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ handy inflation calculator (available here), in the process proving that the BLS does more than just expel bogus and laughably “seasonally adjusted” job growth numbers every month. The professor was kind enough to create and explain the chart below:

As you can see, when you use the consumer price index, also known as the CPI, to inflation-adjust the cost of Bubba’s and the Breck Girl’s haircuts, that is, re-express the costs in current dollars, Hillary, aka the Pantsuiter, is still paying quite a bit more for her haircut. She is clearly the biggest diva in this analysis. Of course, an interesting question is whether the CPI is the best inflation rate to use here. Although these people would never admit it, they don’t live in the real world, so we might need to construct something like the PPI, the pampered politician’s index. Such a deflator might change the results.