NY Times on Animal ID

The Times has a rather sympathetic story on the resistance to the National Animal Identification System here. Cites a New Mexico rancher and a couple others, with a pro forma defense from Hammerschmidt.

Proud To Be a New Yorker

Yes, my mother was very proud. New York was the best state around, having the most people and best places to live (that is, excluding the city). It's declined in the rankings over the years since her time but I'm glad to see it's now taking the lead in one very important area, a field where Nebraska is the last but New York is now the first: the number of houses in the state legislature. NY now has three, the Assembly, the Democratic Senate, and the Republican Senate. See this NYTimes article.

(The background is a closely divided body, in which people of dubious achievement have switched back and forth, leading to a comedy of competing leaderships. Mark Twain would have thoroughly enjoyed the situation. The rest of us, not so much.)

$450 Mill for FSA IT

Via Keith Good's FArm Policy, here's the FFAS Under Secretary James Miller talking about FSA IT. Total bill, estimated $450,000,000.

Best Sentence of the Day

From Ta-Nehisi Coates, from a post discussing reaction to the Sanford: "What good is marriage if it doesn't humble men?" Mr. Coates believes in humility. (So do I.)

Wrong Again, on Carbon Sequestration

House Ag has the text of the agricultural amendments to the carbon bill. (There's also a summary.) I was wrong in my assumptions on how it might work--I was figuring a direct NRCS to farmer linkage. Not so, instead there's provision for "offset project developers" and "independent offset verifiers" which sound like private entities. So the NRCS would be working through these third parties. (This is based on a fast skim and I don't claim any expertise in the area.)

Seems to me this is partially political. (I know you're surprised.) By using third parties you increase the chance of getting influential supporters and contributors on board. Use a government agency, you only get the agency's employees. [Updated: Did I ever link to the National Farmer's Union testimony? They're currently acting, I think, as an offset project developer. They've got an interesting website application show in the testimony as well.]

Because I'm on the weak government kick recently, I'll go on to say this is an example of how and why we end up with weak government (otherwise known as protecting our liberties); the process of getting legislation enacted requires logrolling and obeisance to local power centers.

Don't Send Your Son to College

To paraphrase an old song, because Henry Farrell at the Monkey Cage says:
" university funding people act like starved, feral weasels"

Student Aid Applications and the IRS

The NYTimes has an article on:

The Obama administration is moving to simplify the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or Fafsa, a notoriously complicated form that asks students seeking financial aid for college as many as 153 questions.

If I understand, the biggest part of the idea is to piggyback on IRS 1040 data. Apparently there's lots of overlap, so the Education Department is willing to forgo some questions of value only in special circumstances, and the applicant is willing to permit Ed to access IRS data, the entry process can be simplified, speeded up, and made much more accurate.

Seems to me there's a trend at work--people are more comfortable with having their data online. Whether they trust the government (or Google or whoever) or it's just an evolution as we get more used to the Internet, I don't know.

Blowing My Mind--Fertilizer Misconception

"By 2005 corn yields in the Midwest and China were about the same, but Chinese farmers were using about 525 pounds of nitrogen fertilizer per acre compared with 83 pounds in the Midwest, and farms in northern China generated nearly 23 times the amount of excess nitrogen than those in the Midwest."

That's from a press release from Cornell U about a Science article one of their professors participated in (via Extension.org).

I guess I've still got images of "The Good Earth" at the back of my mind. Unfortunately, I suspect a lot of us would be surprised at this.

Metro and WMATA

The Post runs an op-ed by Doug Feaver keyed to the Metro accident two days ago, decrying the fact Metro doesn't have dedicated funding:

"That Metro exists is a small miracle. Its construction required the legislatures of Maryland and Virginia, the D.C. Council and the U.S. Congress to agree on the same word-for-word, comma-for-comma enabling language. That nailed down the construction agreements.

Construction is fun and politicians love it. Running and maintaining something, however, is hard work, and it is much less visible to constituents, until something goes wrong. As Ted Lutz, Metro's former general manager (and later a Washington Post Co. vice president) once told me, "You never saw a politician cut a ribbon at an asphalt overlay project."

That fits two of my hobbyhorses: the weakness of our governmental structure, as in the extraordinary exertions and leadership needed to create WMATA (Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority), and the parochial nature of politics.

Our Weak Government, Unemployment

Via Understanding Gov, a Wall Street Journal piece on the inequities of the unemployment insurance system, which is run by individual states, not the Feds:

"People in the same state, and even neighbors, can be treated differently, because benefits are awarded by the state where they worked, not where they live."

On a related issue, the Obama administration didn't propose any change in the regulation of insurance companies by states when they revealed their overhaul of the regulation of the financial industry. Insurance agents and companies have big clout in government.