High Income for 2012?

Very interesting farmgate piece on the possible implications of the income figures for 2012.  Farm income will be up, farmers with the harvest price option on their crop insurance will make out well, and taxpayers might question what subsidies should be in the farm bill.

[Updated to fix link]

What Prof. Mankiw Forgot to Point Out

Prof. Mankiw of Harvard notes a Wall Street Journal piece on the growth of entitlement, showing 50 percent of U.S. households now get Federal benefits.  He doesn't note this interesting bit of the article:

In current political discourse, it is common to think of the Democrats as the party of entitlements, but long-term trends seem to tell a somewhat different tale. From a purely statistical standpoint, the growth of entitlement spending over the past half-century has been distinctly greater under Republican administrations than Democratic ones. Between 1960 and 2010, the growth of entitlement spending was exponential, but in any given year, it was on the whole roughly 8% higher if the president happened to be a Republican rather than a Democrat.

Mankiw was, of course, a part of the GWBush administration.

MIDAS Update

A new set of materials on MIDAS are available--see here.  I'm a little bothered by the gap between May and August in the release.  Maybe  I have a romantic view of communication in projects: ideally there'd be a continual flow of questions and answers and information among the developers and the soon-to-be users.  As I say, it's romantic and because most of the communication is probably on the intranet I've only a partial view.

I wonder about coordination among the program officials and the MIDAS implementation team.  That was an area we were deficient in during the System/36 rollout.  The tendency was for program people to focus on current program issues, assuming the systems people had things under control.  Not so.

The Farmer-Owned Reserve of Maple Syrup

Back in the days of the Carter administration the big deal was the "farmer-owned reserve", which was a variation on Secretary Wallace's (of New Deal days) idea of the "ever-normal granary", which he traced back to the Bible and the 7 fat years etc..

Turns out the Canadian maple syrup producers have much the same idea as described in this short Treehugger post.  The point is to smooth out the supply fluctuations due to the weather in order to maintain stable prices.

House Republicans as a Force for Moderation

Okay, it's a surprising title, but here's my theory:

• Republicans maintain their control of the House in November but narrowly--the Rep caucus does not move further to the right by adding many more conservative members
• House Republicans face the prospect of elections in 2014--if Romney wins they're incumbents and are more likely to lose in offyear elections. 
• 2nd term tea party members who won in the Republican wave of 2010 will be concerned about surviving a Democratic wave in 2014.  Some of them will have gone Washington, and will see reason in compromise and "getting something done".
• so the logic of their situation is going to be pulling them towards the center, as opposed to the last 2 years when they were pulling away from the center.

BBC America: No Attention Span At All

Watching the BBC's news at 5:50--interviewing some Brit who's new to American political conventions.  He said, compared to Europe, the rapid-fire Republican convention is made for people with no attention span at all.

Post-Election Prediction

Had a discussion this morning about what will happen after a Romney victory in November.  My interlocutor suggested he would repeal ACA immediately.  This is my response, for what it's worth:

Repeal the health plan root and branch? No. The fiscal cliff will absorb their time and energy. Meanwhile they'll figure out how to handle the good parts, repeal the bad, and still pay for everything. Unless they go the constitutional option on the filibuster, they've got to squeeze ACA repeal into reconciliation, which is going to be difficult. As for the huge tax cuts, no way. They'll be doing good in the fiscal cliff negotiations to extend the Bush cuts, while stopping the FICA cuts. Redoing the tax system as Romney/Ryan propose will take a couple years. And it won't work as drafted--the itemized deductions are too woven into our society. Think of Obama: he promised healthcare and no mandates and climate change legislation and immigration, he got 1 of the 3 with very big changes and he had a big win and a big Senate majority. Romney won't have either, maybe a small Senate majority.

A couple more comments: there's been a to and fro between Marty Feldstein and other Republican economists and Brad DeLong and some Dem-leaning economists about whether the Romney tax plan is possible.  The Tax Policy Institute said it wasn't, Feldstein says it is, DeLong says Feldstein failed elementary math.  IMHO it's all beside the point.  To make it work (i.e., lower tax rates and broaden base) you've got to do what Reagan and Rostenkowski failed to do in 1986, which is to end the deductibility of state and local taxes and mortgage interest.  The problem they had, and the problem Romney will have, is all the realtors in the country, who are very much Republican small business types, support interest deductibility. And all the people who pay high state and local taxes in states which rely on income and property taxes, who again are very much Republican types, support tax deductibility.

My other comment relates to foreign affairs: assume Israel's not bluffing, and Romney's serious about 110 percent support of Israel, we may be seeing a new Middle East war in the first 100  days.  (Of course Obama can't point this out, because he's only 105 percent supportive of Israel.)

We'll see how accurate my predictions are in the 200 days to come.

Do It Right the First Time

My rule is you never do it right the first time (except for landing on the moon). 

Here's further evidence--even when eating leaves is ingrained in your genes you can't do it right.

Meritocracy in Government

Ta-Nehesi Coates blogs about the Chris Hayes book on meritocracy, which I have to read sometime.  I gather part of the thesis is the growth of exams at every stage along the line of bringing up kids--NYC parents even have their pre-K kids tested because getting into the right nursery school leads to the right k-6 school, and so on and so on.  And Hayes says meritocracies become oligarchies--the children of meritocrats become good on tests themselves.

As I commented, the rise of the civil service in 1883 meant a diminishing of the influence of politics, patronage, and fraud, which was mostly good. And the military is pretty meritocratic: everyone starts as an E-1 or O-1, except maybe lawyers, doctors, and ministers. 

Charitable Giving

The state of Utah gives over 10 percent of income to charity.  That's from this interactive website which allows you to search down to ZIP code.