NASCOE--A Friend at AEI?

After this beginning, I'm surprised that this guest at the American Enterprise Institute comes out somewhat friendly to NASCOE:

"The U.S. Department of Agriculture's Farm Service Agency (FSA) is often described as overstaffed and inefficiently structured for its mission, which is to deliver and monitor a variety of federal subsidy and conservation programs"

 Hint: he likes crop insurance just as little.

The Changing Country Scene: Aldie Country Store

Aldie is a little country town on Route 50 west of here.  Emily Wax has a nice article in the Post today on the changes the country store has seen over the years: notably the people running it now are a Hindu couple who employ a Hindu vegetarian to cook their barbecue.

Reason from the Conservatives

Occasionally the conservatives write true things.  This is one--the wrong side absolutely must not win this election. and another

What Difference Does a Person Make

This FCW post reports the Obama administration has 22 "rockstar innovators" coming in to help transform the government.  I wish them luck, I really do. 

But...

There's always a but. My guess is only 5-10 percent of them will have the desired impact.  They may know software and they may know people, but they probably don't know government. 

Point number one: in 90 days they're dead meat if Obama doesn't win reelection. There may be one or two who know someone in Romney's camp with sufficient pull to stay on, assuming they want to but that's all.  And everyone in the bureaucracy knows they're dead meat if Obama's polls continue to fall, so how much cooperation will they get?

Point number two: to be effective the innovator needs to hook up with someone in the bureaucracy who has some clout and is open minded about sharing credit with the innovator.  After all the innovator isn't the secretary's person, he's the president's; he's from the Innovator initiative and he's here to help. ("He" because there appear to be only 2 women in the list.) 

Point number three: during the next 90 days the bureaucracy is going to move slowly simply because of the impending election.  It takes a unique blend of chutzpah and dedication to push full steam ahead on something when it's much more interesting to spend the day checking realclearpolitics and hashing over Obama's chances in Florida or Ohio.

My bottomline--one or two of the innovators may land in the right place where their skills and personality fits with someone already there, and together they may make significant changes.  That's better than not having any changes in the next 6 months, but it's not a silver bullet.

Guns and Laskas

I should hat tip someone but I forget who.  Jeanne Marie Laskas used to write for the Post, and I always enjoyed her work. In this GQ article she explores an Arizona gun shop and its world.  It's honest.

Identity Proofing

From Regulations 

Identity proofing can be accomplished for 
customers in two ways: (1) By visiting a local registration authority 
at a USDA Service Center, or (2) through a new on-line identity 
proofing service. The new on-line identity proofing service will 
provide registrants with a more efficient mechanism to have their 
identity proofed. The on-line identity proofing requires responses to 
at least four randomly selected identity questions that are verified by 
a third party identity proofing service in an automated interface. Once 
an account is activated, customers may use the associated user ID and 
password that they created to access USDA resources that are protected 
by eAuth.

 Estimate of Burden: Public reporting burden for this collection of 
information is estimated to take eight (8) minutes to complete the self 
registration process for a Level 1 Access account. A Level 2 Access 
account registration is estimated to be completed in one hour 40 
minutes when travelling to a USDA Service Center to visit a local 
registration authority (expected to be approximately 30% of the 
registrants), or 50 minutes when using the on-line identity proofing 
service (expected to be approximately 70% of the registrants).
    Respondents: Individual USDA Customers.
    Estimated Number of Respondents: 114,841 Level 1 and 14,860 Level 2 
for an estimated total of 129,701 respondents.
    Estimated Number of Responses per Respondent: 1.
    Estimated Total Annual Burden on Respondents: 31,077 hours. 

This is from USDA's Information Collection Notice.    Some comments:  I assume USDA/OCIO will do the same sort of thing as Treasury has done with their Treasury Direct customers: ask things like what the customer's address, phone number, date of birth, years in house, etc. etc. are--that's the "third party identity proofing service" referred to.  The theory is that such data is publicly available and has been collected by the credit rating people, and other entities, so if I give answers which match that set of data, I must be me.  It makes sense to me.

I wonder how OCIO came up with the time estimates in the document.  When I did this sort of thing with Treasury it was more like 5 minutes than 50--maybe the third party service they use is less efficient than the Treasury's?  I'm assuming, perhaps wrongly, the identity proofing is only for Level 2, seems like bureaucratic overkill to require it for Level 1.

 I'm most fascinated though by the estimated number of respondents. Only 15K Level 2's, which are the people who want to do real business with FSA* online??  Elsewhere I've noted, I think, the big plans USDA/FSA has for moving to online business; I think this figure is inconsistent with those plans being successful.  Trying to construe them as favorably as possible, if I had been writing this document I would have used only the new FSA customers I anticipated over the period of the collection.  I'd assume there's some period OMB says to use for this, though usually you're talking about an annual collection, not an open-ended one.  

Finally I wonder if USDA/OCIO has run this process through a user review, as pushed by Prof. Sunstein.  If the good professor had been bureaucratically sharp, he would have changed the OMB guidance for these documents to specify the extent they were tested with users.

* I don't know that other USDA agencies use the e-Auth process.

The Importance of Bureaucratic Infrastructure

I'll link to a Matt Yglesias post which links to a NYTimes article on the Obama administrations slow and small efforts on the housing front.

A sentence here: "But none of that explains why they were so slow to spend the money that they had that was earmarked for housing."

As is discussed in the article, the policy choices were bad: helping borrowers who were under water meant in the eyes of many, including me, helping people who had gambled and lost.   But another factor is, I think, the lack of the appropriate bureaucratic infrastructure.  The Feds don't deal directly with homeowners and borrowers, they deal with mortgage lenders and bankers.  So if Geithner, Obama, and Summers decided they wanted to do something, the existing bureaucracy wasn't set up to analyze alternatives and propose machinery which could carry out the policy.

This is just another instance of my "we have a weak government" meme.

Why Brits Are Fat: Blame Earl Butz

That's right, according to this article:

The story begins in 1971. Richard Nixon was facing re-election. The Vietnam war was threatening his popularity at home, but just as big an issue with voters was the soaring cost of food. If Nixon was to survive, he needed food prices to go down, and that required getting a very powerful lobby on board – the farmers. Nixon appointed Earl Butz, an academic from the farming heartland of Indiana, to broker a compromise. Butz, an agriculture expert, had a radical plan that would transform the food we eat, and in doing so, the shape of the human race.

Butz pushed farmers into a new, industrial scale of production, and into farming one crop in particular: corn. US cattle were fattened by the immense increases in corn production. Burgers became bigger. Fries, fried in corn oil, became fattier. Corn became the engine for the massive surge in the quantities of cheaper food being supplied to American supermarkets: everything from cereals, to biscuits and flour found new uses for corn. As a result of Butz's free-market reforms, American farmers, almost overnight, went from parochial small-holders to multimillionaire businessmen with a global market. One Indiana farmer believes that America could have won the cold war by simply starving the Russians of corn. But instead they chose to make money.

By the mid-70s, there was a surplus of corn. Butz flew to Japan to look into a scientific innovation that would change everything: the mass development of high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), or glucose-fructose syrup as it's often referred to in the UK, a highly sweet, gloppy syrup, produced from surplus corn, that was also incredibly cheap

That seems to be the thesis from King Corn.  And Butz doesn't disclaim the credit. In my opinion, it's all hogwash. Some day my ambition will be sufficient to document it, but not today. 

Romanticism and Reality: Farming

One source of my skepticism of the food movement in its various manifestations is the nagging feeling their vision is blurred by romanticism.  Seems as if many of the articles  and the blog posts are written by recent converts, eager to spread the word to all and sundry.  Now as a liberal I should be open to such revelations, but I retain enough conservatism to doubt, to ask for a tad more aging of the wine before I take communion.

This bit is prompted by this post from "Pasture Raised and Grass Fed from Stony Brook Farm".

Communal Moments

Ann Hornaday, the Post's movie critic, had an article about video on demand, noting the movement of movie watching from the theater to the home theater.  It fits with another article I read about how fast movies are in and out of theaters.

Back in the day (of my youth), the big movies came and stayed, and we watched in crowds.  Sometimes a good movie would run for months and months.  You knew if you didn't see it in the theater, you wouldn't see it.

Then came TV, and sometime after good movies started being shown on TV, but only every 10 years or so.  Gone with the Wind on TV was a big event.  Of course this was all on broadcast TV, one of the 3 networks would boost viewership by broadcasting a notable movie.   Gradually though more and more movies went to TV; just as gradually UHF stations popped up and cable TV started making its inroads.  And now, of course, movies are available 24/7 through many media.

Back in the day we had communal events, not only big movies but big prize fights, big political conventions, big World Series, big novels. And everyone (i.e., people on TV and in the newspapers and the periodicals) would talk about it.  There was a sense of a national community, although in retrospect some parts of the nation, such as the South, might have been left out. 

Today it seems that the cultural landscape is flatter, there's no big peaks, fewer unifying events.  9/11 and the mass murders, McVeigh, Columbine, Holmes, et.al. may remain but not much else.  There may, however, be a bunch of smaller events: parents seem to find community in following their kids activities much more closely than in my day, and there are more activities now than then.