A Study in the "Iron Triangle"

Shortly after being reelected, Rep. Emerson of Missouri is resigning to work for the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association .

I remember, sometimes I think that's all I do is remember, when President Reagan wanted to get rid of the Rural Electrification Administration.  Didn't happen, and this helps to explain why:

NRECA represents more than 900 rural cooperative utilities in 47 states that have a combined national membership of more than 42 million customers. When the group and its members come to Capitol Hill, they’re people who know the lawmaker’s district.
That base supplies a veritable army of 2,500 to 3,000 co-op members that NRECA brings to Capitol Hill every year, outgoing NRECA CEO and former Oklahoma Rep. Glenn English said in an interview.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2012/12/jo-ann-emerson-nreca-84813.html#ixzz2EgMQpQXo

GAO Report on Pigford

Here's the link.  And the two recommendations:

We are making the following two recommendations:
• To improve the internal control design, we recommend that the Claims Administrator establish and document procedures to provide reasonable assurance of identifying claimants who obtained prior judgments on their discrimination complaints in judicial or administrative forums, including reaching agreement with USDA on the Claims Administrator’s request that USDA check its records of judicial and administrative determinations.
• To help ensure that the design operates as intended to provide reasonable assurance of identifying and denying fraudulent or otherwise invalid claims, we recommend that the parties charged with carrying out the terms of the settlement agreement continue their efforts to fully and correctly implement the remainder of the internal control design, including measures to (1) identify duplicate claims and claims submitted on behalf of the same farming operation or the same class member and (2) verify timeliness
determinations.

Raising Swine, and Not

Walt Jeffries at Sugar Mountain Farm in Vt and his family continue building their swine raising enterprise, and their own abbatoir.  Meanwhile Stonehead in Scotland just sent his last pigs off to the butcher. His problem was a smaller operation, bad luck with accidents and illness, and perhaps most of all resistance from customers.

Finnish Schools

I've generally been a quiet (on this blog) supporter of No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top.  The point being that while teaching to the test is a problem, we can't make progress unless we somehow measure how we're doing.  So the Bush and Obama initiatives seem better than the status quo, however many problems they have.  The idea of measuring value-added for teachers, looking at how much a class advanced during the year, rather than absolute scores also is attractive.

But then you watch this slide show on the Finnish school system and say, maybe I've got it all wrong. Or maybe it's interesting for a small homogenous country but not workable for us. Whatever is the answer, it's worth considering.

Before the Days of COLA

Back in 1950 Congressmen vied to introduce bills to raise civil service salaries.  That's documented in this Post look back at its Federal column from those days.

Also back in the day Congressmen vied to expand the coverage of Social Security and to improve its payments.

Finally back in the day Congressmen vied to enact tax cuts.

Clearly those times were different than now. How so?

• we have 79 Congresswomen, rather than nine.
• civil service salaries are indexed to inflation, removing the opportunity to pass regular salary increases as inflation raises prices.
• Social Security is indexed to inflation, removing the opportunity to pass regular benefit increases as inflation raises prices.
• income tax rates are indexed to inflation, removing the opportunity to pass regular tax cuts as inflation raises people to the next tax bracket and increases the take from income taxes.

Maybe, in consideration of the last 3, being a Representative is a less attractive job, which might explain the first item.

Big Dairy

Via Robin Hanson at Overcoming Bias, I come late to an Atlantic piece on dairy genetics.  Choosing the right bull now considers life span and pregnancy, not just pounds of milk.  (We got about 11,000 pounds when I was growing up.)  Interesting that big data can now pick the best bull in the country.

Movie Lines and Evaluating Government

FCW has an interesting piece on how government is evaluated: we get criticized for failures but rarely rewarded for successes, whereas the private sector gets punished by the market (sometimes) and rewarded both.

How To Increase Your Social Security? Kill the Ex

That's the advice the Business Desk at PBS NewsHour gives, entirely tongue in cheek.

Our Stalwart Forebears

Many conservatives, including a recent Presidential candidate, seem to believe we've lost our way and become too dependent on "gifts" from the government.   In reading a paper on the early days preceding the establishment of USDA I ran across this quote from the Commissioner of Patents, with respect to the seed distribution program:

It has been the special desire and object to provide and place within the reach of the
people, wherever scattered, the means of propagating such new and improved varieties of plants as they would not otherwise have had access to, and which are adapted to their
respective climates. It certainly was never the purpose of Congress to convert this O ce
into a common seed-store, intended to supply the public at large gratuitously with the
means of planting their ordinary vegetable gardens. This fact seems frequently overlooked by applicants to the O ce. It requires no little care and discrimination to guard against a growing tendency of this species of abuse. It would not only be overstepping the bounds of propriety, but would be doing injustice to the people at large, if, instead of their being accustomed to depend mainly upon their own e orts for the means of supplying their wants, they should be encouraged to turn their eyes habitually to the government, as a reliance for such purposes. If this were once established as the rule of action, it would be silently but certainly doing much to work a change in the very character of the government itself, by causing it to be regarded in this particular as the fountain of favors and bene ts. The   people would gradually be parting with that self-reliance which is the parent of energy and the main-spring of success in every undertaking, and which is so necessary to the preservation of individual self respect, and therefore of personal, and nally of national independence.

 This was in 1856.

Progress on Farm Bill?

Politico reports the House and Senate ag types are working out their differences, meaning there might be a way to get a farm bill passed.  I don't know if Nate Silver has any predictions on this; I suspect he's postponing that challenge until after he figures out how to predict earthquakes.