Funny Paragraph of Feb. 20

From Alex at Marginal Revolution, ending a piece on the Feds trying to suppress an embarrassing con job perpetrated on the CIA.

Are you surprised that Playboy would break such an important story? I was, that is, until I remembered that Playboy has been uncovering fakes for a long time.

Republicans in the House and Agriculture

President Obama proposed, again, some cuts to farm programs by reducing figures in the payment limitation figures.  One would figure those stern, tight-lipped budget cutters in the House would be glad to agree to his proposal.  Politically it would seem wise to say: we'll pocket all your cuts and we'll cut some more.  (I'd put this into poker terms, but my mother thought poker was a tool of the devil.)  But not so, as Sallie James observes at Cato.  Bottom line: political principles are remarkably flexible, much like cooked spaghetti.

The Fallibility of Memory

President Obama proposed a big cut to the program which helps low income people with their heating bills. See Pro Publica's discussion here.  Now I would have sworn the program originated under Carter in response to the big rise in oil prices and the embargoes of the 70's.  But while a weatherization program seems to have begun then, the LIHEAP was begun in 1981.  I repeat, 1981!  The first year of Ronald Reagan's term, the President notorious for being personally amiable but professionally hard-hearted.  And 1981 was the year he was cutting taxes and some programs.  So, what happened then?

Food Prices and Inflation

Lots of recent discussion of the rise in food prices, including whether it had an impact in the Mid East uprisings.  But the graph in this post, hat tip Ezra Klein, shows the price trends for "foodstuffs" and finished consumer foods. The former (wheat, rice, corn, etc.) are much more volatile than the later, mostly because there's pennies worth of wheat in a loaf of bread, etc. etc.

Impeccable Logic Representative Lucas

From Chris Clayton summarizing a House Ag hearing:

""The agriculture economy is highly cyclical and it changes like the weather in western Oklahoma: fast, sharp, and without notice," said Chairman Frank Lucas, R-Okla. "This reality helps explain why the mood in farm country today is both upbeat and apprehensive. This fact, along with experience, offer a cautionary note to anyone who might be tempted to cite current economic conditions on the farm as the basis for setting long term farm policies." 

 

FSA--One Plus, One Minus

One of the draft posts I've had started for a couple days is a criticism of FSA's press release/blog post on counter-cyclical payments.  But before I do that, I need to praise the writer of Notice DCP-247 who got to the point: there's no such payments for 2010 because target prices are too high.  That info was buried in this language from the press release:

Farm Service Agency Administrator Jonathan Coppess announced today that USDA will not issue partial 2010-crop counter-cyclical payments to producers of certain covered commodities. Payments will not be made to producers of wheat, corn, grain sorghum, barley, oats, upland cotton, long grain rice, medium grain rice, soybeans, sunflower seed, rapeseed, canola, safflower, flaxseed, mustard seed, crambe, sesame seed, dry peas, lentils, small chickpeas, large chickpeas, and peanuts. For all covered commodities and peanuts, market price projections exceed levels that would trigger these payments.

If the first sentence had simply said "...will not issue any 2010-crop counter-cyclical payments."  it would have worked.  It's the "certain" which throws the reader, because the expectation is there's two categories: certain crops don't get paid, other crops do.

A 2x4 for Agency Chiefs and CIO's

I wonder whether the cuts OMB gave some agencies in IT funds were big enough to get the attention of the chiefs of the agencies, remembering the old joke about getting the attention of a mule by using a 2x4. USDA didn't get such a cut.

The Insidious Assumptions We Make

I was often laughed at when I worked for ASCS because to create example cases of how the farm program would work, I always used 100 acres of corn with 100 bushel yield.  Made it much easier to calculate.  It also was unrealistic even in 1980, and would be ridiculous today.  And I vaguely remember the symmetry of numbers leading to a screwup--something which seemed reasonable with the assumed numbers wasn't.

That's the case with Megan McArdle's recent post on savings. She writes;

 Say you're a 40 year old couple with 100,000 a year in after-tax income, and you save 5% of that, the way ordinary Americans do.  (Assume further that it all goes in retirement).

My point? A couple with $100,000 after tax income is earning maybe $120,000 or more in before tax income. Such a couple is probably close to being in the top 10 percent of the US households, i.e., not "ordinary" and not a good example to use for a discussion of savings.

R.I.P. George Buddy

I'm one of these people who tends to be a day late and a dollar slow in keeping up with social [demands, needs, everything I think of has a double Freudian meaning].  I'm sorry.  George Buddy, the blogger at Buddy's Bemusing,died on Feb 4, 2011 after lung surgery.  I'll miss him.

The Return of the Vicious Budget Cycle

I commented somewhere yesterday on the reason deficits are important--it leads to the vicious budget cycle where an ever increasing portion of the budget goes just to pay interest to fat cats bankers. Today the Post has an article on it. An excerpt:

Starting in 2014, net interest payments will surpass the amount spent on education, transportation, energy and all other discretionary programs outside defense. In 2018, they will outstrip Medicare spending.

 I remember the Clinton administration struggling with this. I'm a little afraid that people who weren't grown by then (Yglesias, Ezra Klein) may not have those memories.  It's well and good to point to the fact that inflation is low now despite the Fed's monetary easing, but it's very easy to get behind the eight-ball, to the detriment of needed programs.