Government Shutdowns--Memories of the Last One

Bloggers and others are starting to pay attention to the possibility that, with the Republicans winning the House and maybe the Senate in November, the next step would be a government shutdown based on a fight between the Reps and the President over budget issues.

I was still working during the shutdowns when Clinton and Gingrich faced off, riding a vanpool in from Reston. As it turned out, the pool included a mixture.  Some people always went to work.  My memory is vague, but I think one guy worked for a section of the Agricultural Marketing Service which was funded by fees, so the lack of appropriations bills had no impact on him.  Then there were several different appropriations bills being considered under different time schedules.  I think Justice got funded pretty quickly; Newt decided that cutting off funds for prisons and law enforcement wasn't good politics and I think one of our riders worked for DOJ. The rest of the pool came back to work in a couple of phases, USDA was deemed more essential than some other people (maybe Interior). 

Shutting down the government always makes for interesting theater and politics.

Bureaucracy and Innovation

Watched Tora Tora Tora the other night from Netflix.  It's a reminder of the problems of bureaucracy and innovation.

For bureaucracy, although Naval Intelligence had broken the Japanese diplomatic code, which led Gen. Marshall to send a telegram to all Pacific posts, the military communications link to Hawaii was out, not having been upgraded to be as reliable as commercial telegraphy, so the telegram went commercial, which delayed receipt.

For innovation, the problems in establishing the standard operating procedures for the new radar installation and its supporting communications and analysis structure.  It's easier to innovate than to integrate the new into the existing structures.

Burning the Pope in Effigy

Some of my ancestors came from Ulster, where lives the Orange Order.  One of the tenets of the Orange Order was an unremitting fight against Popery. So this post in Religion in American History, recalling a little-known order of General Washington, condemning the burning of the Pope in effigy, was interesting to me. (The context: early in the Revolution its leaders hoped to get Canada, i.e., Quebec, to join the rebellion.)

The Growth of Government

Calculated Risk provides graphs which show exactly how greatly government has expanded since 1976, as expressed in terms of employment as a percent of total employment. This is partial followon to a post at Econbrowser. (I'll give the commenters who expressed disbelief one valid point: contractors are excluded from the statistics.

Hollywood and Title Inflation

One of the things people like Paul Light find is the inflation of bureaucratic titles in DC.  Secretary Gates has promised to cut the number of Deputy Assistant Secretaries in DOD.  Wife and I saw The American (we like George Clooney and Italian scenery) today.  I was amused to see a number of credits along the lines of "second second assistant director".

We Don't Know Him

Ruth Marcus has an op-ed commenting on Haley Barbour's comments on Obama, the one where he said: we know the least about him of any President.  She correctly says: the point is, we don't know anyone like Obama.  I'd expand that--he doesn't fit into familiar narratives. For past Presidents, we have a handy label/narrative we can apply:  GWBush, frat boy cheerleader; Clinton, fat boy band leader with alcoholic stepfather; GWHBush, WASP aristo; Reagan, frat boy with alcoholic father; Carter, engineer nerd peanut farmer; etc. etc

We recognize these stereotypes/narratives don't represent the whole man; they're unfair. But I suspect partisans on both sides would agree there's a key element of truth in them.  They give us a handle on the reality.  With Obama the anti people are reacting as I did with Reagan (my person label for him was the "senior idiot"). 

Food Price Trends

Matt Yglesias comments on a David Leonhardt article on housing costs; Leonhardt sees the issue as whether housing is a luxury or a utility.  If the former, then prices might rise; if the latter, prices will track other necessities.It's an interesting article which has also attracted comments from other bloggers.  One in particular was saying "housing" combined houses and land, and most of the appreciation was in land.  {UPdated: Kevin Drum comments.  One thing I haven't seen discussed is the increase in square footage for  housing over the period.]

But all that is a side issue to me, because there's an associated graph of the proportion of household income by category over the last  80 years.  Basically clothing and food had their peaks in 1947 or so, with a consistent decline in each to the present (a bit steeper for food than clothing).  Meanwhile health care costs have been rising steadily since 1947.  The changes in both food and health care are astonishing.

OMB Watch Reports on Obama Naked Government

They give a mixed rating for the first 9 months. 

A Bureaucrat to be Complimented

The head of the National Archives and Records Administration acknowledges his agency ranked lowest in employee satisfaction, in a press release. You can't fix a problem if you don't recognize it.

Eggs and Cage -Free Hens and Dirt

The Washington Post runs an article  on caged and cage-free hens, tied in with the salmonella problem. It's accompanied by a photo, which I don't see on the website, showing hens in a row of nests. The photo called up memories, and thoughts.  (Here's a link to a similar photo, found through Google Images.)  The article said currently cage-free eggs are about twice the cost of cage eggs, and even with mass production the cost differential would still be 25 percent more.

Some points for anyone who didn't have a close association with hens growing up:

• cages permit total control over the hen.  You can use conveyor belts to bring grain to the hen, pipe in water to the waterer, and allow the eggs to roll into another conveyor belt.  The manure drops through the cage bottom  Presto: eggs untouched by human hands.
• cage-free hens who lay eggs in nests, as in the picture, are an entirely different matter. Someone has to collect the eggs from the nests.  Because eggs are laid throughout the day, although more heavily in the early hours of the day, the eggs need to be collected multiple times a day.  Why not just once?  Because eggs are fragile; the more eggs you have in a nest the more likely the next egg laid is going to drop on an egg already in the nest and one or both eggs get cracked.  That's bad for several reasons: you've lost one or two eggs; if the break is bad enough the white of the egg gets out and spreads over any other uncracked eggs in the nest, you've now got dirty eggs which are hard to clean; finally, if a hen tries pecking at the white/egg and finds it good, which they do, you're training a hen to peck at eggs to get the contents.
• even if you collect the eggs often enough to avoid breakage, you face another problem not found in cages: manure.  Hens are not naturally fastidious and will defecate in their nests.  That means some percentage of the eggs collected have manure clinging to them, sometimes really staining the shell.  So after the eggs are collected you need to clean the eggs.  Growing up cleaning eggs was my mother's job, which she did manually.  Could take 90 minutes or so to do 900 eggs.  If she was sick, we could use an early egg cleaning machine, which was faster than I or my father.

So the bottom line is cage free eggs require a lot more labor than eggs from caged hens. I'd assume these days there are innovations which we didn't have 60 years ago, but I think the labor accounts for the difference.

One final note: if you look at the photo, you'll see someone who is collecting eggs will have to lift the hens in the nest to see if they're sitting on eggs already laid.  Now hens vary in their personality; some are timid, some aggressive in protecting the eggs, and some are from hell.  The latter ones will grab a fold of skin on the back of your hand in their beak and pull and twist.  Not a nice feeling.  I still feel the anger from 60 years ago.