Achenbach Visits Manassas Park

Joel Achenbach finds resentment in Manassas Park over bailing out mortgage lenders. I think he missed the immigrant thread, or anti-immigration thread, about which I've blogged earlier.

Ex-Bureaucrat Views the Paulson Bailout

Can't resist commenting on features of the Paulson/Bernanke plan (the text was in both the Post and Times today):

• they were too rushed to think of a snappy title for the legislation, preferably one that forms a snappy acronym. (Gretchen Morgenson uses "TARP"--troubled asset relief program.) That means things were really hectic.
  
• one problem they'll have is in normal times we have a million or two foreclosures a year (too lazy to check the rate, but the point is there's some level of foreclosures that's "normal".) So, do they just take over all securities regardless, knowing they're going to eat the normal stuff, or do they have some way to weed it out. (New bureaucratic programs usually have this sort of problem--it's like paying kids to study, do you stiff the kids who don't need the incentive?)
• the draft legislation makes it not reviewable in court (as has been noted by other bloggers)
• there's no exemption from the Administrative Procedure Act, though I guess the preceding bullet makes this unnecessary. But what it says is there's no legal requirement for transparency (not that Administrative Procedure Act provisions provide that much transparency).
  
• Paulson apparently plans to use Treasury Department to run the program, rather than establishing a special corporation/agency. Might be wise, because it avoids a bit of administrative overhead. But regardless, I hope his administrative people right now are working on outfitting offices, etc. One of the biggest obstacles to doing things quickly in government is the housekeeping functions (where do people work, on what, and how do they get paid).

Read the Morgenson piece for more understanding.

A Bureaucrat and SCS

Many of the former county ASCS employees who came to work for me were a bit disdainful of the Soil Conservation Service--I remember one acid remark about SCS employees spending all their time riding around the county in their trucks, leaving the ASCS employee(s) to handle the people who showed up at the office.

But, time mellows even old loyalties, so here's an article on the founding father of SCS, an example of the difference the right person in the right place can make.

On Generations

Very interesting article on generations, by Siva Vaidhyanathan,says the idea of a tech-savvy generation, and even the concept of a "generation", is a myth. (That overstates things, but he's contrarian.) It's refreshing to a codger who just barely mustered the courage finally to buy a cellphone.

(I particularly liked the quote from the woman who talked about learning programming with punch cards--ah, those were the days.)

ASCS Employee Got Around

According to this article. She would have worked for the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, before joining the WAAC in WWII, making it to Paris and Germany, before coming back. "“I got home on Sunday afternoon and went back to work on Monday morning,” she said."

Quite a life for a dedicated bureaucrat.

Professional Verus Romantics

I liked this post from Musings of a STonehead. Probably because he finds some romanticism in his customers for weaner pigs who are put off by his professional, if small-scale, approach to his business.

IRS IT Systems

A report from Next Gov on IRS progress with IT systems:

Several issues, however, could pose challenges to the project in the long term. For example, while the goal is for CADE to house all taxpayer information permanently, the system stores the data used to process returns only for the current year. Historical taxpayer account data, such as prior year tax assessments and outstanding tax liabilities, are maintained in a separate database not compatible with CADE's format.

In addition, CADE is approaching maximum capacity in terms of data storage. With the expectation that the taxpayer population will increase significantly, the IRS must decide whether to reduce CADE capabilities, or invest in new technology or alternative resources to satisfy demand, the IG recommended.

Without knowing anything about it, I can give IRS a break on the first issue--"backward compatibility" is always an issue when you do a new system, and not always desirable. Presumably over time the problem will be resolved as the current year's data migrates to the prior year, etc. But the second issue--that's a problem. With costs of storage always dropping, the problem has to be in the software. Granted that you always want more (designing software is like a country boy going to a mall for the first time--you keep seeing more and more possibilities) but after this many years of designing systems we ought to be able to do better estimating.

Milk, Fish, and Derivatives

No, not a menu, just a linking of three stories today.
Milk-
the Chinese continue to struggle with their milk scandal--dairies putting melamine in milk to boost the protein count. Problems of this sort remind of the government milk inspector who used to visit our farm. And also of Thoreau's famous quote on circumstantial evidence: "as when there's a trout in the milk" was good evidence the farmer had been adding water to the milk.

Fish-
the Times reports on a study that: "Giving people ownership rights in marine fisheries can halt or even reverse catastrophic declines in commercial stocks, researchers in California and Hawaii are reporting." Who "gives" the rights? The government.

Derivatives are linked to this week's financial problems.

The point I'd make is government has a role in establishing and enforcing rules, rules of identity (what is milk), rules of property (who owns what right). Our history is government is usually tail-end charley, people discover something new, crisis happens, and sometime later government comes along to establish rules.

Why Farming Is Hard

You have to send your wife out to work to get health insurance benefits, and when you're laid up, you are limited to dial-up access to the Internet. Those aren't quite the hardships our forefathers faced, but they make it hard for farming to compete in the market for the best talent. Why shouldn't the farm kid go to town? (In the old days, sufficiently long ago, the answer was because town was deadly, but not today.)

Animal Cruelty

I'm not sure this works. PETA did undercover work at a livestock farm in Iowa, released the film, and Iowa farmers are fighting back. But it's intrinsically one-sided. PETA can pick and choose what's released. It's also true, as a general rule, what an insider sees in the day-to-day routine is quite different than what the outsider sees. It's a question of context, of routine, of perspective.

The best thing the coalition could do is put on tours of their operations--try to drown the PETA expose in a sea of transparency. But that assumes a routine tour wouldn't upset tender-minded undergraduates.