Vilsack as Secretary

Lot's of commentary on the appointment, some pleased, some not. I won't bother to link to them. But I'll repeat my comment somewhere, perhaps on Ethicurean, suggesting the people who are disappointed should shift their focus to the under secretaries, the assistants, and the deputies, and the agency administrators and deputies (or whatever new-fangled titles they've come up with these days). There's lots of power distributed through USDA, even though the laws limit the discretion and the lords of Congress enforce the law with a capricious hand. Vilsack needs to make gestures towards the foodies and the greens with some of the lower appointments so it's important for those groups to lobby for the best and most effective person they can get.

Mobility and Bureaucracy

From a long interesing post by Reihan Salam on David Brooks, Gladwell, upward mobility, with this observation on American bureaucracy:

There’s something else that comes to mind, namely that our mental map of society only rarely captures the gritty terrain. I’m not sure I can articulate this very well, but I’ll try. My mother is a health worker and my father is an accountant who works pretty much exclusively with tiny immigrant-owned businesses and recent arrivals. A lot of the work he does is unpaid, e.g., helping people figure out how to navigate the social services bureaucracy, etc. Through both of them, I’ve learned a lot about the way the plans of the administrative state mesh with the “illegible” ethnic economy of the city. The most virtuous, hard-working people, it often seems, are the ones who most aggressively game the system, which they see in amoral, impersonal terms (which makes sense, as I’m calling it “the system”). Just as much of the prosperity of the Washington metropolitan area is parasitic and illusory — aha! we’ve turned an undesirable civil service job into a lucrative contractor position! — it’s hard not to think that the skids of upward mobility are occasionally greased by fraud. This is one reason my father has always believed that the IRS needs a much larger budget, both to aggressively audit rich tax cheats (he hates them) and also to curb low-level abuse that undermines trust in “the system.” Ronald Reagan blasted welfare queens. And yet Medicaid mills have helped build the fortunes of plenty of otherwise upstanding citizens. Of course I think this is a bad thing. But it’s complicated. The American administrative state isn’t Suharto’s Indonesia — but in some places and times, it can get badly frayed.

I'm not sure how one addresses the problem he touches on here. And I'm not sure it's simply a bureaucracy that seems inscrutable, so it's okay to defraud it. My impression is that farmers think FSA bureaucrats are pretty good (they should, because they're mostly neighbors) but certainly a minority think it's okay to evade rules (yes, I'm thinking payment limitation and eligibility requirements) just the same.

Earliest Hiring of an Attorney in an Administration

The news reports Rahm Emanuel has hired a lawyer. This must be a record--earliest hiring of a personal attorney as a result of a "political scandal". Not a record the political system should be proud of.

Clinton, Obama, and the White House

If memory serves, Bill Clinton ran against George H.W. Bush on many issues. One of the smaller ones was the size of Bush's White House. Supposedly it was too large, too autocratic and subordinated the cabinet members too much. So Bill promised to reduce the size of the White House staff by 25 percent. Carrying out the promise in his first term caused many contortions and much confusion, particularly as he also wanted to set up an economic council (under Rubin) as part of his "it's the economy, stupid".

Cut to 16 years later. Obama made no such promise, even though Dems have made a general attack on the Bush presidency for being too autocratic. As I sit here watching the news, it seems to me, without proof, that Obama is expanding the number and reach of people in his White House office. If true, a couple observations:

• it might be a way to finesse policy differences, by giving each position a seat at the table. That would fit with Obama's perceived pattern of hoping to reconcile differences.
• it is also a step away from "cabinet government", power moving from the departments to the White House.
  
• certainly it is another layer of bureaucracy, posing another challenge to Mr. Emanuel.

Most Farmers Aren't

From the latest ERS pub (page 3): "about 80 percent of total farm household income is derived from off-farm employment" (of course, I'm being too cute with the title--in many households the woman is employed off-farm and the man is farming).

One Problem for Black Landowners

One problem for blacks in maintaining farms is indicated by this Federal Register notice (Hat Tip--Sustainable Ag Coalition):

The Rural Business-Cooperative Service (RBS) announces the availability of approximately $230,000 in funds for fiscal year (FY) 2009 for cooperative agreements to develop and implement pilot programs aimed at: (1) Preventing and alleviating the problems facing African Americans in rural areas that are involved with real estate with clouded title due to unresolved interests of generations of heirs (otherwise known as ‘‘heir properties’’); (2) establishing an outreach/educational program that will assist farmers and homeowners with heir property issues in expanding ownership; and (3) enabling farming heir property owners to develop economically viable agricultural operations and accrue homeownership.

Having clear title is prerequisite to getting financing. I assume the problems behind the clouded title were landowners dying intestate, with the descendants never resolving the title. That's something not likely to show up in history books, or in lawsuits like Pigford. See this piece from the Federation of Southern Cooperatives. (Or Google "heir property").

Contrarian: Farm Programs and Small Farms

One piece of conventional wisdom, among the greens and rapidly spreading among the chattering classes, is that farm programs aid big farms. This is wisdom that isn't true. The following are true, at least mostly so:

• "farm programs" aid field crop farmers, not fruit, vegetable, or livestock farms
• "payment limitations" are often evaded, so are not very effective in limiting farm program payments to large farmer
• "farm program payments" often go to landowners who do no physical "farming"
• "farm program payments" are often issued in the names of legal entities, not living persons
• small farmers need help more than large farmers.
  

What you can't say is that "farm programs" distort or change the pecking order of farms for any given commodity. The big corn farms today would be the big corn farms without any programs.

Tobacco Program Aided Small Farmers

The different farm programs are just that: different. So you can't take results from one and apply them to another. But a post mortem on the now defunct tobacco quota program suggests it, at least, helped small farmers. We didn't run parallel tests, but looking at what happened after the program ended is suggestive.

Washington Times has a story on tobacco growing in the U.S as of now. When the program ended, many small farms went out of business, at least out of tobacco, to be replaced by fewer bigger growers. There also may have been an impact on smoking--the price has gone up so smoking has gone down. The program also operated as a price umbrella for developing countries, which could undercut US on price. Now we're exporting more.

No "Cow Tax"

Per EPA via Brownfield.

Clones

Clones aren't in the headlines much anymore. Sara at Down to Earth linked to this institutional video from an ag cloning company to give a glimpse of the people in the business. My reaction: I hadn't realized it had become so routine (at least for horses and cows).