Tax Cuts and the Stimulus

An article this week on the $100+ billion dollar Obama tax cut, which no one ever heard of.  I regard myself as well-informed, and I may have been vaguely aware of the cut back when it was passed, but it soon slipped my mind.  As it happens, the stimulus package included the cut.  It seems as if it's part of the packaging problem Obama has had. He loses on two counts:

• because the tax cut was included in a bigger legislative package, it didn't and doesn't get the publicity it would ordinarily rate
• because people equate "stimulus" with "spending", Obama's seen as a bigger spender than he should be.  That's given the ordinary usage of American politics, which says spending is only when the government writes the check, not when tax breaks are given out.

Resume Speed and Mayor Fenty

We're back home, although still with PC problems, so there will be a slow resumption of blogging.  One thing I noted in the Post was Mayor Fenty's last hurrah, or at least his last opening/reopening of a DC library.  I was sort of casually aware he'd been active in the area, but the Post piece gave him lots of credit, both for facilities and for his support of the libraries.  The best bit of news in the piece was the fact that circulation of books etc. from the libraries is up 125 percent.  As Mrs. McNamara and assorted first ladies have said, reading is fundamental.

IRS, FSA, and Adjusted Gross Income

Some problems in the process, apparently.

[Updated: Rereading the post at the link, I'm confused, and I'm losing faith in the underlying article. Will try to return to the subject soon.]

Get Coffee from Your Local Bureaucracy

Megan McArdle views Starbucks as a model bureaucracy.

Slow Posting

Between computer problems and travel over the weekend, blogging is apt to be light.

The Cost of Farm Programs

Is down and likely will continue down, given last Friday's crop report (cutting corn production and carryover, with cotton still at a buck).  See this graph (average of about $12 billion for the last four years).  Cato back in 2002 predicted the 2002 farm bill would cost at least $170 billion over 10 years.  So much for predicting the future. (Which isn't to say that the various programs can't be challenged and shouldn't be reformed or dropped, just that foreseeing the future is difficult.

Prognostications of the Future

Kagan and Kristol foresaw the future in a book published 10 years ago. Via Tom Ricks The Best Defense, here's a look back.

[Needless to say, they were about 95 percent wrong, and totally missed bin Laden.  But then, no good liberal would ever pay attention to any book which got the future right--what would be the fun in that.]

Where's the NAEP for Government?

 NAEP stands for National Assessment of Educational Progress.  It's a set of tests to see what students know and can do in different fields; thus, it's indirectly an assessment of schools, which is the way it's mostly used.

Assessing teachers is hard.  We've all had good teachers and bad teachers, and some of the teachers who were good for us maybe weren't so good for other students in the class.  And maybe some of what we learned wasn't really what our parents or the local community wanted us to learn, and thought they were paying the teachers to learn.

So is assessing government bureaucracy hard.  Compared to education, there's probably even more disagreement over the value of various programs.  The GPRA of 1993 was an initial attempt to try to assess performance. I'm dubious of its value, but now Sen. Lieberman and others are trying to revise and update it. I'm still dubious.  To make this real, there should be an administration strategic plan and a Congressional strategic plan. Obviously what Obama wants the EPA to do is different than what Sen. McConnell et. al. want the EPA to do.  If the EPA does a plan that's the lowest common denominator of the two, it won't say much.  But even then, if Obama and McConnell were paying attention to the strategic plan, that would be a big improvement.  I suspect the reality is neither will pay much attention to it, meaning it's mostly an exercise in bureaucratic paper creation and shuffling.

Government Is Good

That's the title of an interesting website, not a blog, of a professor at Mount Holyoke College.  He has a bunch of articles arguing various points.  

Another Dairy Farmer Goes Out

In central New York. Their numbers keep dwindling.