Even Farmers Market Farmers Get Old

The LA Times has an article on the graying of farmers selling at farmers markets. An excerpt:

IN GENERAL, experts say, new farmers market growers tend to come from one of three groups: young idealists looking for a rural lifestyle, immigrants who use farmers markets to make money from small plots of land, and those like Coleman who inherit family farms.

Assuming that's right, it tells you few people go into farming to make money, even though money can be made, at least in good years like this one. Of course, that statement is also true of teachers and even public servants (as us bureaucrats like to be known).

Al Gore and Procurement Fraud

I blogged about a month ago on abuse of government credit cards and noted Al Gore's contribution. The Project on Government Oversight has this perfectly ironic note.

"One of the more ironic stories of purchase card abuse comes to us from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where a U.S. Forest Service employee, Suzanne Poetz, has pleaded guilty to stealing $300,000 from her agency's program. As part of her plea, Poetz admitted to over 150 instances of theft. But the best part of all? In 1998, Poetz received a Hammer Award from Vice President Al Gore--for developing the Agriculture Department's purchase card program. (The Hammer Awards were given to federal employees whose work "resulted in a government that works better and costs less")."

All I need to see now is a story telling how someone, maybe a Republican congressman, who pushed for contracting out government services made money by taking bribes from such a contractor.

What Should They Fear?

Economists (if "they" = "political candidates).

So says Brad DeLong

Somehow, I'm not convinced that economists are fearsome. Truman supposedly wanted a "one-armed" economist, because his always said: "on the one hand...on the other hand".

Best Result of the Night

The report that the Indiana ID law denied the vote to some nuns (no picture ID, too infirm to file a provisional ballot and then get an ID). I wonder how our mostly Catholic Supreme Court is feeling now about their recent decision upholding the law. (If I recall, the decision rested mainly on the idea that no harm had been shown--no one had been denied the vote.)

[I'm waiting for this to be revealed as a belated April Fool joke.]

Clearance Process

This article says OMB is going to rely on automated matching of data to speed clearance process.
Here's a followup article

I have some doubts--the TSA watch list shows some of the problems of putting together databases. And genealogists run into the problem regularly--does record A refer to the same person as record B? I think a learning, evolutionary process could work. By which I mean, assign something like a credit rating to a person based on available data, track the person's history and adjust the rating accordingly. Unfortunately, that sort of thinking doesn't fit with the black and white, binary choice world of security clearances.

The Perversity of Rules

One thing the Dems promised in 2006 was, if they gained the majority, they would reinstate the "pay-go" rules--the procedural rule saying that any law authorizing new expenditures must also include a means to pay for it (raising taxes or cutting other programs). All right-thinking good government types applauded this, and the Dems carried through on their promise.

So what's the problem? Well, as Dan Owen at Blog for Rural America explains, it creates an incentive to maintain old programs: "What's the response of those writing the farm bill? "We need to protect our commodity program baseline"." In other words, it's true enough that most crop farmers today are doing well, but if the ag committees cut direct payments in the new farm bill, that reduces the "baseline". A reduced baseline down the road means reduced ability to increase payments if that were needed. So, a good rule encourages a bad result--there's no such thing as a free lunch.

What the World Needs Now: Smarter Flies?

Actually, yes. According to this NYTimes article on animal learning, some scientists bred flies to be smarter. That's a revelation--flies do learn. And then they determined that smarter flies had shorter lives. The general argument is that while there are benefits to being able to learn, there are also costs. (As Robert Heinlein would say, there's no such thing as a free lunch.) It's not quite clear where the costs come from, though if the young have to learn by experience, they're more vulnerable than if they were hard-wired. And brains are costly in terms of energy. (That's why there are so few in evidence these days.)

Fresh Food, Local Food

The NYTimes has an article on NYC's loss of supermarkets, meaning more people have to drive (assuming they have a car in NYC) to buy fresh produce. Apparently rents are rising (presumably because of a still hot real estate market and the rejuvenation of the city) and the profit margins just aren't there. Supermarkets are facing competition from other outlets, which sell milk, beer, etc. Reading between the lines, produce must have especially low profit margins. Perhaps because of spoilage--how often do you see lots of produce in the supermarket that's past it? And that's with the advantage of loyalty cards, so they can tell that the Harshaws will buy 14 bananas a week with about 95 percent reliability. Or maybe it's the problem of establishing reliable supplies over the year. That says something about the problems faced by the locavore movement and organic farming.

Sodsaver Provision

I hadn't been following this. At gristmill a story on the "sodsaver" provision: "The House and Senate versions of the farm bill both contained this new provision, which would have prohibited crop insurance and non-insured disaster payments for production losses to producers in any state who plowed up native grasslands in order to plant crops. This would have also prevented these farmers from receiving regular disaster payments, because farmers must first have crop insurance in order to be eligible for disaster payments."

Apparently the conference committee is restricting it to the desert pothole area (i.e., the area of small lakes/marshes left behind when the glaciers retreated that are great for ducks, etc.) and making it optional by the governor. That's much to the regret of conservationists. What concerns a former bureaucrat is the possibility the law will mix apples and oranges. Mostly in the past, eligibility provisions have been either/or, land or person. A person who violated the sod/swampbuster provisions would be ineligible for all payments everywhere. Or, if the program provisions on a farm were violated, there might be no payments for that farm. But this sounds as if it might be a mixture--someone plows grassland in ND and in SD, for example. ND says okay, but SD says no. Result--person is ineligible on all his land in SD but not in ND. Very difficult to control, unless the IT systems FSA uses have gotten considerably more sophisticated.

It's also interesting--under sodbuster NRCS would have to have an approved plan for the farm to make the producer eligible. Sounds to me as if this "sodsaver" provision is a tacit admission that NRCS was unable/unwilling to administer the "sodbuster" provisions as originally intended. No real surprise--NRCS as a bureaucracy did not have the culture of policing regulations.

Inconsistency, Thy Name is Human

Some, often on the conservative side, argue that we shouldn't increase taxes or pass laws to fight global warming. The threat of warming is projected and not proven, the cost would be too great to act now, why suffer lower growth now to help future generations?

Some, often on the conservative side, argue we should increase taxes and change laws to fight the social security trust fund deficit. The threat of SS bankruptcy is proven by projections, the cost would be minimal if we act now, we must suffer now to help future generations.

And then there are the opponents, who tend to take the opposite side of each issue.