Tit for Tat: 110 Murders in DC

Buried in this interesting article, one of a series on a sequence of murders/assaults in DC, is this statistic: about 110 of the 143 murders in DC last year were part of sequence of tit for tat retributions.  Scientists have gamed the right strategy for evolving cooperation, which turns out to be tit for tat with random acts of kindness.  Apparently in DC that strategy is alive and well, except for the random acts.

What struck me though was the idea 80 percent of all DC murders involve these relationships, which doesn't leave many for killings within the family or random acts. 

Peterson and USDA Organization

Sometime in the past the chair of House Ag, Rep. Peterson, was planning on working on a reorganization of USDA, specifically the county service end.  I'm operating on memory here, but I think that's right. 

But recently I've only heard about his hearings on what should be in the 2012 farm bill.  I don't know what that means--whether he's given up on the idea, whether he's planning on doing it next year, or whether he's waiting to see if he can kill the direct payment programs and replace them with crop insurance, which would probably impact the organization. 

Brooks Is Wrong

David Brooks today in the Times has a column on the American public's ambivalence--we don't want the government involved in lots of stuff but when there's a crisis, like the Deep Horizon blowout, we want the President to be front and center.

Here's the sentence I disagree with: "At some point somebody’s going to have to reach a national consensus on the role of government." And closing with"

"We should be able to build from cases like this one and establish a set of concrete understandings about what government should and shouldn’t do. We should be able to have a grounded conversation based on principles 95 percent of Americans support. Yet that isn’t happening. So the period of stagnations begins."

My bottom line is it's an intellectual's fantasy.  We never, in all of American history, have had such a consensus by 95 percent of the American people.  What we've had in the past, and will have in the future, is a tug of war among our various principles and viewpoints, with the balance sometimes one way and sometimes another.  It would be too easy to say we never go all to one side.  We actually do: we decided over time that slavery was wrong, that hierarchical customs were wrong, that segregation was mostly wrong, etc.  But on the role of government we've gone back and forth.  And thus it will be in days ahead.

Accident = Russian Accent

The Post has a article today on an American woman who had an accident and recovered but with a "Russian" accent.  Apparently this is a rare but recognized phenomena, although the accents may differ.  Given the recent research on how the brain is modified by learning, I'm fascinated.

Memorial Day

Garrison Keillor at Wolf Trap last night spoke in memory of an Anoka, MN man, 2 years younger than he, who died in Vietnam.

I'm old enough to remember going to the cemetery on Memorial Day to clean the graves of my grandparents.  With the popularity of cremation such ceremonies will dwindle away.  Maybe that's why college students these days supposedly have less empathy for others.

Crop Insurance Administration

I wonder what the Congressional Research Service or GAO might do with a study of the administrative costs of crop insurance.

I wonder if any FSA CED's would volunteer to administer crop insurance policies for what the companies average? 

The Food Movement and the Tea Party Movement: Brothers Under the Skin?

I think there are a number of parallels between the Tea Party movement versus the Food Movement (as defined by Pollan):

1. Both have producerist strains: true value is not produced on Wall Street nor on big industrial farms; for foodies true value is produced by small family farmers.
2. Both see international institutions as antagonists.  The food movement attacks international corporations, the tea party attacks international government, the UN, the north American compact, etc
3. Both elevate local values over national and national over global values.
4. Both draw, I think, from the middle and upper middle classes, mostly white. The Tea Partiers may be a tad more suburban and red state, the foodies a tad more urban and blue state.
5. Both have anti-technology strains.
6. Both see the American people as innocent, passive victims.  The Tea Partiers give no hint that the government they dislike and the programs and institutions they would kill have been endorsed by both parties in popular elections going back for decades.  The foodies give no hint that the obesity they deplore and the food they would trash result from the choices of consumers and families over decades. 
7. Both seem to be nostalgic romantic movements, seeking to turn back the clock to an earlier time, at least in selected aspects.
8. Both are suckers to con-men with dubious schemes, such as vertical farming or the return to the gold standard.
   

Peterson on Payment Limitation

Today's FArm Policy led with this:

The Washington Insider section of DTN noted yesterday (link requires subscription) that, “Shifting away from direct payments [related graph] would go a long way toward resolving the problem of farm payment limits, which Ag panel Chairman Peterson sees as the main reason for opposition to federal farm program. ‘A lot of the huge payment issues would go away if you don’t have direct payments,’ Peterson said. Direct payments, he says, are what generates ‘all the opposition because we make payments to people who aren’t farming [such as] people who own land [but] who live in New York City.’

I'm not sure I follow his logic.  Yes, there's a difference between saying Bigshot farmer got $X in taxpayer money and saying he got $X in taxpayer subsidized insurance indemnities, but it's not that big a one. Certainly it won't fool the smart people in the food movement, and I doubt their friends in the mass media.  Maybe I'm wrong--twill be interesting to see. 

I believe I'm correct in saying, as a general rule, the people who get indemnity payments and the people who get direct payments should be the same people: i.e., those who have an interest in the crop.  There may be minor differences in how the rules work and there may be major differences in the administration of the rules, but again we'll see.

Payment LImitation and Crop Insurance

Some random thoughts triggered by EWG's publication of crop insurance data and the various testimonies before the House Ag committee on the trade-offs between FSA farm programs and insurance.

One thing not yet mentioned: payments under most FSA programs are subject to limitation, crop insurance is not.  So it would be logical for big farmers to push for putting more benefits under the crop insurance umbrella rather than FSA.  (What does that mean--raising benefits, cutting the loss needed to trigger payments.)  Cutting against that logic is the fact that cotton and rice producers seem to be the biggest fans of the traditional FSA programs, and not of crop insurance.

It might be possible to apply a payment limitation, or indemnity limit, to crop insurance--continue to subsidize the administrative costs and indemnities up to a given figure.  After all, FDIC insures savings accounts only up to $200,000 ($100,000 permanent); car insurance limits the liability amounts; homeowners insurance limits liability.

Overpaid Bureaucrats

Yes, I consider Federal Reserve members to be bureaucrats.  And I mean the title sarcastically.  See this via Wonkbook from the Wall Street Journal:


That means Ms. Yellen [paid $410,000 as chair of San Francisco Fed), who is President Barack Obama's nominee to be the next Fed vice chairman, would see her pay more than halved [to $179,700]  if she is confirmed to the post in Washington."

[Sorry, I blew the link.]