All You Need to Know

"...sex — a fun, affordable, and ecologically sustainable passtime."  From Matt Yglesias on coed dorms.

Politico's "Errors" and My Jumping the Gun

FarmPolicy links to this Politico story on the outlook for farm programs.  It also links to this ERS graph


From Politico: 

 "At issue is the estimated $15 billion to $20 billion the government spends in subsidies each year. Originally a Depression-era program, farm subsidies have evolved into a complex maze of economic assurances for farmers: direct payments, federal crop insurance programs, counter-cyclical payments (which trigger when commodity prices fall below a certain mandated level) and other programs. "

From ERS: total payments have been below $13 billion for the last 5 years. 


Now Ms. Cogan might be including crop insurance in her definition, though she doesn't say. It would be good if she were including crop insurance, but I suspect it's more likely she's using a figure stuck in her head from earlier years.

[Update:  It should have been obvious from my quote she was including crop insurance as a subsidy.  So: I was wrong and she was right. 


 I emailed her complaining, she responded immediately, very nicely, and I got off my duff and checked the CBO estimates.  Essentially they've upped their estimate from $16.7 to 17.3 billion because increased crop insurance costs offset the decrease in counter-cyclical payments.  ]

Lesson for Web Designers: Use Common Sense and Test

That's the gist of this post at "Partnership for a More Perfect Union", which rates Congressional websites. While their advice is directed to Congressional webmasters, it applies to everyone.

Saddest Phrase of June 12: Prison Is a Safe Place

"...prison appears to be a healthier place than the typical environment of the nonincarcerated black male population." 
From a study reported by Barking Up a Wrong Tree, comparing death rates of prisoners with civilians. Part of it may be healthcare differences.

Different Ways to Skin the Cat--Bus Arrivals

Metro has signs showing when the next subway trains will arrive.  That's new since I stopped riding regularly (meaning about 13 years ago, so not exactly a recent development).  It's very nice, though people now will take it for granted.  There's been efforts over the years to do the same for urban bus systems: have the stop display when the next bus is due.  I think there've been a few implementations of this.

A different approach than displaying the arrival time at the stop is probably better; after all, once you arrive at the stop unless it's very late you're pretty well committed to taking that bus. So this approach of Google's seems a lot better: display the real arrival times on your cellphone.  Presumably there's the same logic behind the scenes as when the display is at the stop, but putting it on the Internet and available to cellphones is so much better.

Public Management Conference With No Public Managers

That seems almost be the case (there were two civil servants there) at this conference reported by Federal Computer Weekly.

Erroneous Payment Process and Eligibility

Here's a Federal Computer Weekly article on the administration's hopes and plans for VerifyPayment.gov, their portal to try to reduce erroneous payments and the more detailed Federal Times article.

It strikes me as a parallel to one of my better ideas, the FSA eligibility file.  As I've mentioned before, I visited ASCS county offices in the late 60's, spending enough time to observe the detailed work processes.  I remember being struck in one office by the clerk's (this was in the days before they were called "program assistants", much less "program technicians" as I believe today's nomenclature is) systematic process for issuing deficiency payments.  Essentially she had what Atul Gawande has written a book about: a checklist.

Move forward a number of years and we're trying to implement the payment process on the IBM System/36.  But there was a problem between assembling the necessary data to compute the payments and actually approving and printing the checks.  That's where the idea of the eligibility file/checklist came in: a place to record the various determinations which affected payment eligibility (i.e., controlled substance conviction, sod/swamp, etc.). And our Kansas City developers could create a common routine, so any FSA program area could inquire to see if the producer was eligible for that program.

As a digression, I've always regretted we didn't have the available people to build on the eligibility file to automate the source documents  It wouldn't have been that difficult and would have eliminated the gap between the county committee making a determination and getting it  recorded in the eligibility file.

Anyhow, back to the Verifypayment process--it seems to me the Feds could and should take the same approach: make a front-end process which tells the calling entity whether the subject is alive and eligible for the payment.  The website lists some of the major program areas they're focusing on, but the approach could be expanded so that state and local governments could access it, as well as OPM for deceased annuitants. 

Ho Hum, A White House Rural Council

From the USDA blog, an announcement of a cross-cabinet council to focus on rural matters.  The chances of this accomplishing anything significant: zilch.

The "name" members are all cabinet officers, who are much too busy doing their day jobs to spend any real time or effort, much less money, on this.  The people who will actually attend the meetings, after the first one, are assistants to the  deputy assistant under secretary, someone whose time is not valuable. 

They're With the Protestant Supreme Court Justices

That's my answer to the question John Fea uses as the title of his post.  I suspect there is some relationship between the lack of mainline Protestants on the Supreme Court and as candidates for President on the Republican ticket.

If You Can't Do It, Change the Rules

Via Farm Policy, here's an article on the possibility of going to 2-year budgets.  It's probably a good idea, but it reflects Congressional failure to pass budgets under the current system.  And the current system reflected Congressional failure to pass budgets under the prior system  And the prior system reflected Congressional failure to take a comprehensive view of expenditures and income.  It's called moving the goalposts.