Direct Payments in Jeopardy?

This piece from Uof Ill extension discusses the possibility that the direct payments program will be changed/cut/redirected. Two big factors: you can't defend the payments with farm income so high; WTO calls the payments fine.

How Soon We Forget (Under the Power of Political Prejudices)

Scott at Powerline commenting on the Dems debate:

"Senator Clinton recalled that President Bush's desire to avoid "eliminating the debt" (I think she meant deficit) "was one of the excuses he gave when he voted for [sic] those horrible tax cuts in 2001."The absence of any reference to the toll of 9/11 is striking, as well as the animus against reduction in income tax rates."

I think if he would check in early 2001, when Bush pushed his first round of tax cuts (before
9/11:

• First, there was no deficit. There was a surplus.
  
• Second, surpluses were projected that caused people like Greenspan and the Treasury to worry there might not be enough debt to fulfill the functions of the Treasury market. That's one reason they dropped the 30-year Treasury bond auctions(which I had bought earlier).

As a matter of fact, with a little googling, I came up with this piece from May 3, 2001:

"This is why the Treasury Department under the Bush administration will have to make some important decisions about the future of the Treasury market by November. In that period -- which includes the three quarterly Treasury auctions in May, August and November -- the Treasury is going to have to give a clear indication of what it wants to do with the government bond market. It can let this market fade away in the most organized and least disruptive way possible. Or it can do its best to keep the market alive.

Because of large budget surpluses, the government is expected to have no real need to borrow in a few years. And if the government ceases to issue bonds and notes, the Treasury market would lose its role as a benchmark for interest rates, a haven for worried investors and a tool in many of Wall Street's regular financial transactions."

Now Hilary may well be wrong that Bush ever connected his 2001 tax cut to the need for debt. But she was right about the rest. And Powerline's memory is demonstrably vague (as we all are when we don't like the facts).

Google Maps, and Local Farms

Here's a neat add-on to Google Maps--local content: in this case, a map of farms around Boston.

Class Society

In the Post today, Montgomery County awakes to the fact that the median new house costs $1.13 million. (Poor Fairfax county is cheap, only $965 K.) And on the op-ed page there's Harold Meyerson writing about haves and have-nots.

Call me a curmudgeon, but I think the society is more divided between the "haves" and the "pigs".

Why Can't We Get a Budget?

Congress is in the process of passing another "stop-gap" budget measure. Back in the day, when I started work for the Feds, our Fiscal Year was July 1 to June 30. But Congress started having problems meeting it. So sometime, maybe late 70's, the powers-that-be came up with the idea of switching the FY start to Oct 1. That would surely give enough time for a reasoned and considered budget process.

Fat chance.

North Dakota FSA

Here's a story on crop insurance, based on an interview with a brother of a state FSA specialist. Now I understand why the specialist was assertive in meetings--he had the experience of fighting for attention in a large family!

Conservation Compliance

Ken Cook of Environmental Working Group has a big report on the workings of "conservation compliance" (i.e., the requirement that farmers with highly erodible land be in compliance with a farm plan to receive some benefits from USDA). (Not clear when it was released--a letter to the ag committees was dated in May, but a press release in Sept.) Sounds as if much of it is based on a GAO report (no--I'm recovering from a cold and am not masochistic enough to plow through the entire report, particularly one as dispiriting as this.)

Why "dispiriting"? It's also fascinating. I remember talking with co-workers (CR, RA, and TMM) in 1984/5 when SCS as NRCS was then was pushing the "green ticket". There was skepticism: did they really know what they were getting into? The answer, of course, was: No. SCS was an educational and scientific agency, very uncomfortable with regulating farmer's behavior. And we in ASCS, as FSA was then, felt lots of Schadenfreude and not much helpful empathy at their predicament when the friendly puppy of an agency caught the car they were chasing and didn't know what the hell to do with it.

A few of us tried to work on data sharing between the agencies so the provisions could be enforced as the law required. But we stumbled, tripping over our own delusions, and mostly the fact that no one of importance in USDA really wanted to be that intrusive in farmer operations. (I remember visiting Sherman County, KS, on the western border of KS, in 1991 where the farmers were still hot over the idea that their land was highly erodible (rainfall < 20"). So we retired in disgust (ed: you're being overly dramatic.) .

I have to wonder where EWG was on Sec. Glickman's proposed merger of the FSA and NRCS support functions in the late 1990's. Had that been done, it might have been easier to get the sort of data they're asking for now. Or it might not. Never underestimate the power of delay.

Great Bureaucrats in History--Colonel Petrov

Overcoming Bias has a post honoring Colonel Petrov, whose actions probably saved my life (Reston being close enough to a nuclear target that my wife and I would have been impacted had he merely followed procedures instead of saying: "Nyet".

Dairying Today and Immigration

Of course, as farms get bigger and families get smaller, dairymen need to hire workers. Interesting piece here talks about New England dairy owners (no, not the Dutch who have developed large dairies elsewhere in the country) and their immigrant labor.

The French Get Fat

The LA Times has an article reporting that French people are starting to get as fat as Americans. They just started later. Don't know what this says for the Kingsolver thesis.