When Is a Farmer a Farmer?

When he's a Fairfax trial lawyer earning $500 an hour and a candidate for county supervisor?

The Post reported yesterday Gary Baise collected $300,000 in program payments 1995-2005:

"Baise's farm, where he grew up, is operated by John Werries, whose brother Larry was a high school friend of Baise's and former Illinois director of agriculture. Baise said he makes all decisions on planting, marketing and sales, and visits five to 10 times a year. The acreage is evenly divided between corn and soybeans."

I wonder what it would do if payments were restricted to those living on the farm? (Baise says he doesn't like the program. He can't be fairly criticized for taking advantage of it. )

Immigration Linkage?

This Post article describes a linkage between immigration and housing--actually two linkages: immigration swelled as more jobs working in construction became available. As immigration swelled, more immigrants entered the market to buy houses, sometimes financing the high costs by renting rooms to construction workers. Now the housing bubble has popped, anti-immigration seems the predominant mood, and local housing prices are going to pot.

From what I see around, I can't disagree. (The Post also had an article yesterday describing a shortage of cooks for new restaurants--$20K doesn't cut it for a line cook. And Wednesday my local Safeway Starbucks was closed--no workers. That is going too far.)

Prediction--This Blog Will Fold

The government has a new blog. I've been meaning to post on the redundancies in government outreach but I'm rushed today so I'll just record my prediction that the blog won't catch on--doesn't provide "added value" in the old consultant's catch-phrase. The information the posters are providing is available by Google, the personalities are rather opaque (I know, mine is opaque too, but these are active duty government bureaucrats).

"Legacy of Ashes"

Reading this history of the CIA--it's readable and seems authoritative, although rarely praising the CIA. It also doesn't put Presidents in a good light--so far Ike, Bedell Smith, and John McCone, come off the best (I'm up to Nixon).

Us Millionaires Are Too Damn Rich

From the Wall Street Journals blog, a report of a report on worldwide wealth:

Millionaire households (those with $1 million or more in assets under management) represented 0.7% of the world’s total and owned $33.2 trillion — or about a third of the world’s total.

I shouldn't claim to be a millionaire by this definition (though if you include the value of the house...). But it's obscene for less than 1 percent of the population to own a third of the wealth. (Remember this post when I appear to be moving rightward.)

Bureaucratic Meetings

I realize the title is sort of redundant. Mr. Munger describes "The Five Sorry Rules of Lateness"

Forgiveness

The Religion Writer has a post discussing the Amish, the shooting at the school, and the relationship of forgiveness and 9/11. Also refers to the new Donald Kraybill book on the subject. I liked his previous book, which gave me enough knowledge of the Amish to be able to use them as a comparison to mainstream society.

For example, when the locavores praise local agriculture, I can think of the Amish and say, yes, but. There's tradeoffs and there's tradeoffs. Do I, proud progeny of a line of teachers and preachers, really like the idea of ending school at the eighth grade?

And forgiveness--I admire the way they dealt with the blow. (Of course, the wounded got good medical care that depended on advanced schooling.) But do I really want to be that forgiving?

Questions--no answers.

Pigford Again--the Lawyers Relief Act

MK, faithful reader, points me to this post, describing the current state of play on the Pigford provision in the new farm bill. The major issue seems to be estimating the number of claims that will be filed and will ultimately succeed and what the dollar amount of those settlements will be.

Only a cynic would note this sentence: "In contrast [to the prior legislation], the House farm bill would allow late-filing Pigford claimants to file a civil action, where claimants are unlikely to have the same success rate...." Why might it be noteworthy? What do you need to file a "civil action"? A lawyer. How does a lawyer get paid? Presumably (based my extensive legal education reading John Grisham and Scott Turow) on a contingency basis--a third or a half. So this provision might be providing, depending on whose estimate turns out to be right, from $33 million to $1.5 billion for underpaid lawyers.

What Do We Expect of Government Employees?

I'm prompted by a scattering of factoids in today's press, which I won't even bother to link to.

• Item. GAO reports some government bureaucrats are flying business/first class. (One being a deputy assistant undersecretary for USDA (those job titles keep getting longer).)
• Item. A mention of the starting salaries for law school grads ($160K).(More than all but a few federal employees.)
  
• Item. Blackwater head defends his employees, who earn multiples of what the retired Gen. Pace did, in front of Congress.
• Item. NYTimes has a diagram showing the "old boy network" (my terminology) of how the up and coming wheeler dealers in finance relate by school ties (clue Harvard Law and MBA and undergrad, Yale, and the other usual prospects).

I guess the lesson is, government employees give stable service for middle of the road benefits. If you want the big bucks, and the comfortable seats, you have to take the risks inherent in being part of an old-boy network.

Old Structures and New Trends

A post on Grist attacking the new crop insurance pilot program, whereby farmers cut their premiums if they use certain Monsanto seed corn led me to interesting testimony before Congress on problems with crop insurance here.
Scott Marlowe is apparently based in North Carolina and makes interesting points:

"The fastest growing segments of North Carolina’s farm economy - livestock produced under
production contracts, specialty crops like greenhouse, nursery and Christmas trees, and emerging value-added markets such as organic and specialty livestock - are all underserved, if served at all, by current crop insurance programs. We are moving rapidly from crops with extensive risk management and disaster programs to enterprises with ineffective or no risk management."

"The challenge for crop insurance is that the emerging markets and differentiated products do not come with the uniformity and automatic data collection that provides the underpinning of conventional commodity crop insurance. The very aspects of these markets that make them vibrant and exciting and profitable – the ability to respond quickly to a wide variety of specific niches of quality and production – are the same aspects that make it extremely difficult to program for them. The traditional product development approach of developing a crop specific
risk profile and then releasing a crop-specific insurance product is unable to address the diversity of emerging products, enterprises and markets."

Organic producers pay a 5 percent surcharge for crop insurance, but get coverage at conventional prices, not the premium prices they can command.

I wonder--will private insurers independent of RMA fill these gaps, as free-marketers would expect, or does the RMA/private colossus preempt such innovation?