Whoever Said Conservatives Are Heartless

Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution promise to quash the poor, but all in aid of a suffering conservative.

FSA Hopes Rise

Nothing makes a bigshot bureaucrat's heart sing like the prospect of another program to administer. From a discussion of the current status of farm bill:

“Another thing I have been talking about is that we ought to look at the ag disaster program in terms of paying something for this coverage. It will not be crop insurance, it will be a separate program in the Farm Service Agency (FSA). The days of just giving something away is over with. Producers will sign up for it if they want it; if not, they do not have to take the offer. But signup will involve some cost...that just makes sense. So we have some element of payment in it. Perhaps participants will give up some of their direct payments in exchange of getting a better safety net – not all of their direct payments, but some minimum level of coverage. They could buy up (to a higher level) of coverage under this program, but this is not crop insurance. It will not be actuarially sound. And, again, there would be a crop insurance requirement to be covered under the ag disaster aid plan. So this could actually be a pretty good safety net. And it could serve as a transition to another program in the future.” Peterson said, “The Bush administration originally pushed their GAP coverage, but I said, 'Look, this will not be crop insurance. It is not actuarially sound. It will be run by the FSA, so give it your best shot. What they did looks pretty good.”

Competition in Schools

I've always, being a good liberal, resisted the idea of school vouchers and charter schools--two ideas of libertarian conservatives who argue that introducing competition into the education system would improve it. Other than prejudice (and the fact I'm the child of a school board chair), I doubt its usefulness in the rural areas--there just aren't enough students for multiple systems to work. And I'm skeptical--is a parent going to risk her child's education by trying a new, untested charter system? Seems as if human inertia would work to preserve the existing systems. And the idea that charters might skim the cream has some force to me.

But pieces like Marc Fisher's post here make me doubt my position. The comments pro and con are interesting.

French Farmers Again

I'm not sure a British teacher of English to the French is an expert on French agriculture, but Dirk Beauregard reports French farmers are doing well. But he also says:

So, French farmers have never had it so good, however roughly 70% of the income of French farmers comes from European subsidies. In 2007, the nation’s farmers received 10 billion Euros in European money, from a total European agricultural subsidy budget of 41 billion Euros."

That's amazing and a far greater proportion than US farmers ever get from subsidies. Of course, it's the sort of factoid that could be retained in memory, even though it's not true, or a one-year phenomena. Not quite an urban legend, but the same sort of thing.

Cows as "Spimes"

Here via John Phipps. Here's an interesting talk by Bruce Sterling on "blobjects", spimes, and other entities.

And see this from the NO NAIS people (RFID chip that can be read at a distance, perhaps for bull riders).

And apropos of cows, here's a bit on the Taiwanese dairy industry.

Definition of a Farmer, En Francais

Dirk Beauregard posts on the definition of a french farmer. Contrary to the title, the post is in English. Some interesting statistics included as part of the definition--income from agricultural produce must be at least 25 percent of the value of the farm. (I wonder whether that works for the U.S.--let's say an acre of Iowa land produces 150 bushels times $3 = $450 but it's worth $4500??) Interesting issue for an economist.

The existence of an official definition fits the conception of France as a very bureaucratized country, but they have more agriculture in proportion than the U.S.

Closer to a bureaucrat's heart--the French ag ministry has 40,000 employees for maybe 400,000 official farmers. USDA has maybe 100,000 for 1-2 million farmers (depending on the definition). That's misleading, because each ministry would have different responsibilities, etc.

Also interesting--apparent French farmers are members of a corporation that provides social security and health insurance?

Review of Barbara Kingsolver

John Phipps has his review of Barbara Kingsolver's book. I recommend it highly.

Canadian "Bureaucrats"

Our good neighbors to the north have a civil service system that seems to be modeled on the British one--at least they have a senior bureaucrat heading the service. He spoke, as follows:

"He listed his top myths and "misconceptions" about the public service -- which, left unchecked, will undermine the government's ability to recruit and retain talent in the face of the fiercest labour market in 35 years. Mr. Lynch took over the job two years ago and made "renewal" a priority, a promise cynically dismissed by many bureaucrats and observers as another reform plan that will go nowhere.

Mr. Lynch's list of the top eight misperceptions include:

- The public service is a pale shadow of its former self;

- There is nothing wrong with the public service, so we don't need renewal;

- The public service can't compete for talent anymore;

- The capacity to develop public policy is not what it used to be;

- Public servants are afraid to take risks;

- The public service isn't well managed;

- Public service reforms never accomplish anything;

- The public service is out of touch with Canadians."

Some of the items would apply in the U.S., as beliefs, and perhaps reality. (Consider the last--I can guarantee American civil servants are out of touch with Canadians.)

Those Damnable Advisers

One of the things that happens with complex government programs is that people set up businesses acting as advisers or intermediaries between the citizen and government. (Think H&R Block, etc.) That's true with US farm programs--I remember visiting the Fresno County FSA office in 1991 and finding one cotton/rice outfit had a person whose whole job was working with the FSA and Reclamation offices (water rights, supposedly limited to 960 acres were big, as well as the cotton and rice payments).

So too overseas, as described in this blog post at the CAP Health Check ("CAP" being the EU's farm program). The lesson being--when there's money to gain, people will work to gain it.

Wheat Allotments

I posted earlier on the possibility of reverting to permanent legislation, dismissing the idea. But a commenter says there may have been meetings on it. It's still hard for me to take the idea seriously, at least as we were approaching in the run-up to the 1985 and 1990 farm bill. Before we got away from wheat allotments and feed grain bases in the late 1970's, you needed three things to determine a farm's effective wheat allotment:

1. the Secretary's estimate of the wheat acreage we needed in the nation
2. the total of basic allotments
3. the farm's basic wheat allotment.

Say no. 2 was 62 million acres, and no. 1 was 31 million acres (i.e., we needed only 50 percent of the wheat we historically grew). Then the farm's effective allotment would be 50 percent of its basic allotment.

So, to revert back to the permanent legislation in 1985 and 1990 meant that we needed to carry the farm's basic allotment, as recorded in 1977, forward (i.e., "reconstitute it" for FSA types). But that's assuming something, that the way USDA had done allotments in the past was the only way to go. And assumptions, as I often say, get you in trouble. Looking at the permanent legislation in the 1938 act you might not have to reconstitute the basic allotments at all. Of course, it would take some lawyering, but the USDA lawyers are known for invention (witness the 1983 Payment-in-Kind program).

Anyhow, I'm no longer an expert, just an old kibitzer. I still think it's all a game of poker and USDA is trying to run a bluff. Of course, the best bluff is when you aren't. (Thomas Schelling famously observed of the game of "chicken" (the way teenagers in the 1950's got their thrills, two cars driving straight at each other, seeing who would swerve first)--you could win it if you could toss the steering wheel of your car out the window.