End of Farm Programs, End of Workload

Farm Policy quotes extensively from a Wall Street Journal piece on farm programs (behind pay wall), including this bit of interest:

The Journal article also noted that, “Meanwhile, workers in the USDA’s county offices, seeing the handwriting on the wall, are campaigning for new things to do, now that there aren’t any price-support payments to dispense. One idea is to give them responsibility for federally subsidized crop insurance, currently handled by private companies. Because crop values are higher, the amount the federal government spends annually on crop insurance is forecast to climb above $7 billion by 2013, up 60% from last year.”

 NASCOE is getting ready for its convention, with the President raising issues, including whether to try to protect as many jobs as possible, given the likelihood of a 10 percent cut in staffing and plans to close more offices.

A Poor Commentary on American Society

The lead sentence of an MSNBC piece of a few days ago reads:

"Black men are half as likely to die at any given time if they're in prison than if they aren't, suggests a new study of North Carolina inmates."

Two more paragraphs:

"White prisoners died of cardiovascular diseases as often as expected and died of cancer slightly more often than non-prisoners.
Black inmates, by contrast, were between 30 and 40 percent less likely to die of those causes than those who weren't incarcerated. They were also less likely to die of diabetes, alcohol- and drug-related causes, airway diseases, accidents, suicide and murder than black men not in prison."

IRS Is the National Bureaucracy

Via Mankiw, this article is a very detailed discussion of  tax expenditures. Recommended if you're interested.  What strikes me is one of my pet ideas: our weak government.  Basically the IRS is the only national bureaucracy, the one and only instrument of government which is able to touch (ouch) the vast majority of people in the country.  So if we want to subsidize children we give a child tax credit, if we want to help the working poor we give the earned income tax credit, if we want to encourage home-ownership we permit deduction of mortgage interest, if we want people to have health insurance, we don't tax employer provided health insurance, and so on.

Our approach hides the size and cost of the government, as the article describes.  It also results in a less efficient IRS, because it has to do a lot more things, rather than focus on the task of collecting taxes and finding tax cheats. Of course that fits with the reasons why we Americans like a weak national government: we don't like a bureaucracy, at least not an obvious one, and we think freedom is having invisible constraints.

Fairfax County: The Leading Dairy County

Yes, by some measurements Fairfax county is the country's richest county, but its true measure of fame came 110 years ago when it was the leading dairy county in Virginia, apparently a position it maintained until the 1950's.  Herndon Patch has a post on this, and the famed Sadie, who apparently average 11-12,000 pounds of milk a year as the best known Holstein in the world.  That's compared to the average cow in VA which produced 2,500 pounds.  If I remember, our Holsteins in the 1950's were producing something comparable to Sadie, but they had the advantage of another 30 or so years of breeding and advancement in nutrition.

ACRSI Comments

See this USDA blog post for an invitation to comment on the proposed acreage and crop reporting system initiative, either at USDA or through comments on the Federal Register publication.

American Exceptionalism: the Good and the Bad

Robin Hanson says after citing research showing that people are more willing to do bad if they've recently done good:

Citizens of the United States are especially proud of a history of (supposedly) doing good. The US sees itself as having saved the world from Nazism and Communism, of creating and sustaining modern medicine, of educating the world via the best universities, of being the main innovators in computer tech, of upholding the highest standards of civil and gender rights, of being unusually devoted to religion, etc.
All this self-respect, deserved or not, probably makes US citizens more willing to do bad, both individually and collectively. Dear US citizens: please ask yourself how sure you can be that your actions on the world stage are actually for good.

SCIMS--Mea Culpa

Via a commenter on Ta-Nehesi Coates blog, here's a fine list of falsehoods programmers believe about names.  Unfortunately for SCIMS, I believed a whole lot of them, even though I should have known better. My only consolation is that I wasn't alone.

Numeracy Lacking

A post at Freakonomics on how to visualize the national debt, which notes a comment on a previous post which was off by a factor of 10, but which garnered 11 "likes".

From Service Center Intiative to MIDAS

I'm curious how USDA went from the Service Center Initiative of the late 1990's and the MIDAS plan of 2004--was there a rational decision process or just the switch from Dems to Reps?

Flash: GAO on MIDAS

FiercegovernmentIT discusses a GAO report on MIDAS.  Doesn't look like good news.  [Updated with the following]

It's behind schedule and there's no clear roles for management. The second paragraph of the summary:

Executive-level governance for MIDAS has not been clearly defined and does not
fully follow department IT investment management guidance. Specifically,
oversight and governance has been assigned to several department and agency
bodies, but roles and escalation criteria are not clearly defined among them.
Department officials reported that department guidance is being followed for
monthly status reviews, but not for department-level reviews at key decision
points. The lack of clarity and definition for the roles of the governance bodies
could result in duplication or voids in program oversight, as well as wasted
resources. Moreover, because MIDAS is not being governed according to the
department’s investment guidance, the department may not be rigorously
monitoring and managing the program and its risks, and may not have the
information it needs to make timely and appropriate decisions to ensure the
success of MIDAS.