Why the Food Movement Should Like High Estate Taxes

A common refrain against the opponents of the death estate tax is it will harm family farms. It will force the sale of farms which have been in the family for generations.  Assume a 1,000 acre in Iowa, valued at $7,000.  If husband and wife are the owners, then the exemption has to be at least $3.5 mill (which I think is what House Dems want).  But of course, some farms these days are larger.  So what happens if the estate tax is applied: presumably the owners sell off some land.  Selling land puts more land on the market and presumably improves the chances for aspiring farmers to break into the business.  That's what the food movement would like, more and smaller farms.   So the food movement should be pushing for lower estate tax exemptions.  And I don't see a free market rationale for preserving the larger farms--if bigger is better, as most commercial farmers think, the new owners will simply assemble land parcels into a new, big farm.

House for Sale

Here 
[Updated: Ipswich, MA]

The NRA Is More Powerful Than the Farm Bureau

Why do I say that?  The Post has been running articles on guns, and yesterday's piece describes how, when the ATF revokes a gun dealer's license, games can be played so a relative gets a license and the gun shop goes on as before. Apparently these games  over who is the entity receiving the license are permitted by the terms of the relevant law(s) and the way Congress has directed the ATF to administer the law.

While the supporters of farm program payments such as the Farm Bureau have exerted influence over the payment limitation provisions of the law, including issues of who is considered the entity receiving payments, they don't seem to have been quite as successful as the NRA.  The last I knew, FSA was still looking for paper entities.  It may not be a great distinction, but when the issue is payment limitation, FSAers will take anything they can find.

A Juxtaposition

In today's Post there was a report that some hotel workers had their assignments changed because someone didn't want them working on the same floor where the party of  an Israeli cabinet officer had rooms. They were Muslem, apparently.  Separately an update on Richard Holbrooke's last words mentioned the names of an attending doctor and surgeon, one possibly Arab and one born in Pakistan.  One wonders what would have happened if the Israeli cabinet minister had been injured in a traffic accident and rushed to the ER where Holbrooke was treated.

A Liberal's Wet Dream

Via Matt Yglesias, NY Times has an interactive website for the new Census data.  Looking at the tract in which I reside (western Reston/eastern Herndon south of Toll Road BTW I think the center of the Internet) the racial ethnic distribution is:
white 39%
Hispanic 24%
black 14%
Asian 22%
other 2 %

Median household income $84K

Odd figures for housing: the median unit is at $507K, up 97 % from 2000 to 2009 but the median rent is $920, down 2 %.  I frankly can't believe the house price, unless it excludes townhouses.  The discrepancy between the rise in housing and the decline in rental rates is interesting.

Variety in School Lunches, A Thought

The White House has released a "before" and "after" school lunch menu. Obviously the "after" is both more nutritious and more attractive (at least to a geezer's eyes, perhaps not to those of a 10-year old).  One thing which strikes me about the menu is there's more items in every "after" menu than in the "before".   Just on a fast skim, the "before" averages about 4 items, the "after" about 7.  Just thinking about logistics, as a bureaucrat often should, the difference implies an increase in costs as you've got a more complicated inventory to procure and manage and a more complicated and more labor-intensive process to assemble the meal.  I wonder whether school lunch administrators were involved in creating the menus.

A Good Sentence for Dec 14

"And in those 20 years, he’s never been right" (from Matt Yglesias on Thomas Hoenig, the inflation-fighter Fed man from KC.

Words on Inequality from a Founding Father

Brad DeLong posts a letter from Jefferson to Madison which I remember reading in college.  It's of interest in many ways (sentiments which were the basis of appropriating the land of the Native Americans, botanical research, etc.) but here's one sentence:

I am conscious that an equal division of property is impracticable, but the consequences of this enormous inequality producing so much misery to the bulk of mankind, legislators cannot invent too many devices for subdividing property, only taking care to let their subdivisions go hand in hand with the natural affections of the human mind.

I might link it with this Tyler Cowen post relative to Australia's equality.

Cleopatra as the Great Bureaucrat

Reading Cleopatra, one of the Times' 10 best books of the year.  Parenthetically I note the readers' reviews at Amazon average between 3 and 4; a rather surprising result which is explained by the fact many reviewers expected to find a biography full of sex, even a book of historical fiction.  Instead, they find a book which tries not to go too far beyond the available sources, which are few and untimely. (Consider trying to describe the Constitution from a book by Charles Beard and one by Glenn Beck.)

Because of the scarcity of sources, the author weaves in lots of detail about Egyptian society and Roman society, which strongly appeals to me. What surprised was the extensive bureaucracy the Egyptian state possessed, even down to tracking the amount of seed provided to a farmer and requiring the return of that amount after harvest, in addition to taking 50 percent of the crop. And Cleopatra served as chief bureaucrat, likely being a more hands-on administrator than such heads of state as Henry VIII and Khrushchev.

Sen. Warner's Regulation Proposal Is Wrong

Sen. Mark Warner of VA has an op-ed in today's Post on regulation.  Specifically, he's proposing legislation to require agencies to kill a regulation for each new regulation they write, alleging: " our current regulatory framework actually favors those federal agencies that consistently churn out new red tape. In this town, expanded regulatory authority typically is rewarded with additional resources and a higher bureaucratic profile, and there is no process or incentive for an agency to eliminate or clean up old regulations."

Although the regulations I wrote for ASCS/FSA were mostly not the sort of regulations Sen. Warner has in mind, iI've multiple problems with it

• A nitpicky problem is one of definition: what is a regulation?  Is it a section of the Code of Federal Regulations or a part? Does it relate to a specific law, or perhaps a title of a law, remembering that many "laws" as passed actually contain multiple "laws", particularly in the case of such legislation as the farm bill? How about a regulation for a yearly program: if the 2007 direct payment program is different than the 2009 direct payment program, is that two regulations or one? Whatever definition is used, a sufficiently ingenious reg writer can work around it, by judiciously combining and splitting documents, or including the new regulatory provision in a revision of the old regulation.
• "Old regulations" don't necessarily mean obsolete regulations.  AMS has probably not changed many of its regulations defining commodities for many years, but those regulations don't need changing or dropping just because they're old.
• "Obsolete regulations" need not be oppressive regulations.  For example, suppose the government regulates the making of buggy whips. Well, IMHO there's few buggy whip makers around to be adversely affected by the obsolete regulation, and therefore little economic gain to using scarce resources to do away with them.
• It fails to consider the Congressional role in rulemaking.  For example,  a recent NYTimes article described the regulatory work involved in implemented Obama's healthcare and financial regulation packages; I believe Sen. Warner supported both.  What obsolete regulations would he have Treasury and HHS drop?  When Congress creates some programs and sticks them in the farm bill, without killing old programs, what regulations is FSA supposed to kill?
• It's a de novo proposal, by which I mean it's made without any recognition of past efforts in this direction.  (Sen. Warner's too young to remember the Carter administration and its love of sunset provisions.)  Someone fed Sen. Warner the OECD report on regulations and he saw a chance to make his name based on adopting it here.  I would be more impressed if Sen. Warner and his staff had looked at the existing inventories of federal program and rulemaking activities,  consulted with the people in the Obama administration who are working in the area of rulemaking, thought about public involvement, talked to GAO which did a report last year, and made some considered proposals.
• [Updated: The proposal requires more work for federal regulation writers, without providing any funding.  Therefore we need to consider what the writers won't be doing if they carry out Sen. Warner's proposal: ignoring public input on regulations or taking longer to write new regulations (the GAO study already outlined how long it takes to get new things out the door). As a former businessman, Sen. Warner should realize there's no such thing as a free lunch.

Note: Sen. Warner is one of my senators, I voted for him, and I plan to vote for him in 2012.  But  he should take this back to the draft stage.]