When Old Men Frown on Young Men Carousing

Sen. McCain is to be honored for his service, but....  From what I've read of his life, he was a world-class carouser when a midshipman at Annapolis and well into middle age, excepting the years when he was in the Hanoi Hilton.  So I can only smile at his outrage over the recent Secret Service/military hooha.  The men involved showed bad judgment and poor morals, but it's a bit sanctimonious for Sen. McCain to cast a stone.  If consorting with a prostitute is cause to lose one's federal job, Sen. Vitter should be sent back to Louisiana.

Flash from the Committee: Pay Limit

Chris Clayton reports the Senate Ag committee plans to wrap up its version of the 2012 farm bill today.  He says:

The bill considered by the committee on Thursday also lowered the adjusted gross income eligibility to $750,000. Moreover, the bill makes major changes to language involving "actively engaged" to further restrict who is eligible for payments.

There will be a study to determine the feasibility of whether popcorn should be considered a commodity crop.

 Apparently they agreed to tweak the bill enough to satisfy the cotton/rice/peanut group.[Updated: according to Politico they did something for cotton, but not peanuts and rice, much to the disgust of  Chambliss and Cochran.]

Get Educated and Live Longer

Ran across a map of the country this morning, the URL for which I lost, but here's a close replacement, showing color-coded counties, representing their life expectancy.  The pattern is for the coasts to have the highest life expectancy, Appalachia, the Delta, and reservations to have the lowest.

The color coding meant that there was only one county in upstate New York which stood out as long-lived: Tompkins county.  Why?  That's where Ithaca is, the home of Ithaca College and Cornell University.  Education makes a difference.  Maybe the best way to cut healthcare expenditures is to improve our education system?

[Updated with the url from the Rural Blog which triggered this post. Interesting how color coding and different metrics affect one's perspective.]

Great Bureaucrats: Bob Mondloch

Bob Mondloch and I (and Les Fredrickson) worked together in the early 70's on the MAP (Management Analysis Project--think Business Process Reengineering 20 years before that buzzphrase came in existence). Bob was a good man, sharp, hardworking, good judgment, sense of humor.  He'd been detailed from whatever the conservation division was called in those days--must have been when Nixon and Earl Butz were trying to kill the Agricultural Conservation Program to MAP as its executive director. At that time he was either assistant to the director of the conservation division or deputy, but he may have become director right before he died. He died very young, or so it seems to me now, probably in his early 40's, I think of a heart attack, and probably before 1976. 

Bob was one of a group of youngish men who moved from the field to DC in the 60's to replace the generation which had run the agency since the New Deal days and WWII.  Some found other jobs as the Republicans downsized ASCS and the boom in commodity prices seemed to be making the agency obsolete.  Some stayed on and led the agency through the 70's and 80's.

Anyhow, I ran across a reference to Mondloch House and tracked down this page, which offers a side of Bob I never knew about, but which is no surprise at all.  A notice of the marriage of a son in 1991 says Bob's widow was chaplain at Mount Vernon Hospital.

Farm Bill Delayed

Trying to keep everyone happy is hard, and Sen. Stabenow didn't succeed with her draft farm bill.  Politico and others observe the peanut and rice people are upset, so consideration of the draft in committee was delayed. 

In Defense of Bricks and Mortar

I've often said giving farmers on-line access to FSA programs/operations is the wave of the future.  But now I need to recognize the other side.  Here's a post at Ezra Klein's Wonkblog on the virtues of opening storefronts to sell Blue Cross/Blue Shield health insurance. It will possibly take another generation before Americans are equal to the challenge of understanding online applications.  Maybe even longer.  (I'm sure it will come eventually.) Until then, there's a role for hand holding and in-person explanations.

Senate Farm Bill and Farm Policy

Keith Good has a discussion, partly from Chris Clayton, of the provisions of the farm bill to be considered by Senate ag on Wednesday and the reactions of different farm groups.

I think I've reached the point where there have been so many changes in legal provisions over the years that I can't follow the draft very well.  For example, one thing which did strike me was the provision that the producer's decision would apply to all the cropland he or she controlled in the county.  That seems to be a break from the past in which an operator could have multiple farms in a county.   I don't know if that's right, and if it is, how much it will complicate the process of maintaining farm records.

The fact that program coverage is on planted acreage--don't know how that fits with WTO but since they did provisions for upland cotton to handle the dispute with Brazil I assume the writers are happy with it.

Does Al Gore Have the Last Laugh?

Turns out he's a member of the inaugural class of members of the Internet Hall of Fame.  I expect all Republicans who laughed at him to humbly apologize to the winner of the 2000 election (popular vote division).

Kevin Drum Goes Gentle on Financiers

In a post about why the financial community is opposed to Obama (a meme from Brad Delong), Kevin opines there are two reasons:

My guess is two things. First — and there's no point in pulling punches here — they're a bunch of spoiled brats.

 Read the whole thing.

Politico on Farm Bill Budget and Politics

Politico has a nice piece on the farm bill.

Within the commodity title itself, about $50.2 billion would be saved by repealing current subsidies, chiefly the cash payments. From these savings, $28.8 billion would be re-invested in a new revenue insurance program that would give farmers added protection against “shallow losses” —not covered now by traditional crop insurance.

The new approach is most popular in the Midwest Corn Belt, and Southern cotton and peanuts have been promised concessions in the process. But there is still Southern regional sympathy with rice growers, who are put at a decided disadvantage and who had been banking on some relief through a more traditional system of target prices and supports.

Because of its high capital costs, rice has relied most heavily of the direct cash subsidies and will lose as much as $3 billion from the proposed change in commodity payments. At the same time, rice has been reluctant to jump into crop insurance, since the crop is grown in flooded paddies not vulnerable to drought.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0412/75515.html#ixzz1syaYNKd4

Of course the rice growers have big bucks to throw around.  (I'm reading David Corn's latest book with a reminder of an estate tax modification pushed by Sen. Lincoln which got included in the deal between Obama and the Reps after the 2010 election.  Wonder who was pushing it?)