Pigsford, Keepseagle, and BP Oil Spill

I'm late in commenting on the resolution of the Keepseagle lawsuit (which roughly follows the Pigsford lawsuit, but with Native Americans as the aggrieved party). An agreement was signed last week. 

I haven't followed it in enough detail to know the answers on the issues of class action and funding.

• if I recall,  for Pigsford, the initial lawsuit didn't pass the threshold to achieve class action status.  If I remember, Congress had to pass legislation allowing the suit to be treated as a class action. Apparently Keepseagle didn't have that problem.
• also my memory says there was some reason the Pigsford settlements (the first one) had to be funded by Congress instead of using the existing Department of Justice fund. The Keepseagle ageement is using the DOJ fund, which means claimants won't have to depend on Congress to act.

The Post had a piece on the Keepseagle complainants.  No one in my position can talk about discrimination.  I did note, however, one of the complainants couldn't get a farm loan at 4 percent from FSA but was able to get an 8 percent loan from a bank.  This ties to something I may have written before: the original intent of the farm loan program was to help those for whom help wasn't available through normal commercial channels.  That is, if the local banker would make you a loan, then you should go there and not to the government.  Whether or not that theory is still in effect I don't know.  And it's quite possible it might be the policy on paper, but the reality is the well-connected are able to get FSA loans regardless.  And the situation may well vary from county to county and state to state.

Some Academics Are Not Sensible

See this review from Treehugger of the latest vertical farming missive. Just because someone has a PhD doesn't mean they have common sense.

FSA and the Amish

I was on a task force with the CED of Lancaster County some 35+ years ago.  At that time she didn't do much business with the Amish farmers, who were mostly dairy farmers and didn't believe in participating in government programs.  Thus it surprised me to read this post on the FSA blog, describing the outreach of the FSA farmer loan program in Cerro Gordo county, Iowa to the Amish farmers there.  I'm not clear whether the difference between a loan program and a production adjustment program makes a difference in acceptability, or whether it's just the passage of time which has changed their attitude.

More Tolerance for Promiscuity Today?

That's the claim of Prof. Hanson of GMU:

" Norms and practices have clearly moved in the direction of increased tolerance for promiscuity over the last century, though of course they aren’t remotely near an extreme free love scenario."  

I'm not sure what country and class the good professor has in mind, but he may be misled by popular history.  For example, my understanding is the British upper classes, as represented say by the Victorians (think of Churchill's parents), were very promiscuous; once you had an heir and a spare in the bank, wives were home free whereas the husbands were always free.

Elsewhere prostitution was more prominent in urban areas in the 19th and first half of the 20th century.  And notoriously, one-third or more of the first children of the Puritans of New England were born "prematurely".

Old News--Dems Get No Love for Farm Bill

That's in a recent Farm Policy--the idea was that the Dems would pass a farm bill which would please farmers, thus enabling blue dog Democrats to be reelected in 2010. But current polls show many of the Democratic representatives on House Ag to be in trouble, or walking dead.  What will happen on House Ag as the Republicans take control and the Tea Partiers talk about cutting government? Will the backscratching between farmers supporting food stamps and urban reps supporting farm programs continue, or will the coalition dissolve into short-sighted turf protection.  I don't like the idea of the Dems losing the majority, but it at least promises to make life interesting.

Work for FSA--Michael Roberts Predicts Disaster

Roberts has a take on the corn situation, and observes it's likely the good weather we've had in the Corn Belt the last 15 years won't hold.  That means more disaster work for FSA.

Those DAmn FSA Bureaucrats Force Money Into My Pocket

That's the position of a Republican candidate for Congress in Indiana. Even if it were true, which it's not, there's always the "conscience fund" at the Treasury, which accepts donations.

IRS, FSA , and Adjusted Gross II

Still dealing with PC problems, but I need to get back to this subject. Here's the Iowa State's pdf paper
and a paragraph from it:

In the fall of 2010, FSA offices received a list of people who the IRS claimed did not send in their CCC 927 forms to Fresno. Those farmers then began receiving official notices of the delinquency in the mail. It is believed that the problem involves the unfamiliarity of the IRS with the CCC forms. The IRS has been notified of the issue and is being further advised as to the nature of Form CCC 927 and how it is to be processed.

In my hurried reading earlier, I was confused by this.   Rereading and reading between the lines here's what I understand:

• some farmers participating in the program sent their CCC-927 forms, authorizing IRS to tell FSA whether their AGI was above the limit, to IRS in Fresno
• since this was the first time for the process, some IRS people in Fresno didn't know what the forms were and what to do with them (probably particularly in the case of misaddressed forms)
• some farmers who were supposed to send in their forms didn't
• FSA presumably gave IRS a list of tax ID's of program participants who should have supplied CCC-927's.
• IRS matched the list from FSA against their list of CCC-927's received.  They gave FSA a list of ID's for which they hadn't recorded a CCC-927, either because it got lost, was misprocessed, or was never sent.
• FSA broke the list down by county and sent it out.  (Maybe I missed it, but I would have expected a PL notice to have gone out as well. So for this and the next steps, I'm relying on Iowa State.)
• The FSA county offices notified their program participants that no CCC-927 was recorded, meaning eligibility for payments was in question.

That's as far as I'd go without seeing FSA procedure.  These sorts of matching efforts between bureaucracies are difficult to work through. If the producer knows she mailed the form, she's going to be mad, and scared about maybe losing her payments, or at least going through a lot of hassle.  If he didn't mail the form, he's maybe going to lie and say he did, because who's to know.  Either way the poor person at the counter in the county office is going to take some heat.  Eventually, after some time, the systems will get worked out and expectations established, but not this fall.

Dems Are Wrong

They're planning to push a $250 payment to seniors to make up for the absence of a COLA for social security (and, I'd assume, Civil Service retirees).  I understand the politics, but it's not right.  If the COLA formula is right, you adhere to it, regardless of the answer it gives you.  If it's wrong, you fix it.  If you want retirees always to get a little boost, make the formula more complicated (I love complications) and take it from prior or future years.  But the total disbursed shouldn't be subject to political motives.

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.