Oh For the Days of "No Cost" Tobacco

Once upon a time long ago there was great outrage when people discovered the government (ASCS) was doing tobacco price support (and marketing quota) programs at the same time the Surgeon General was saying smoking was bad. 

After sufficient pontificating on the Hill, legislation was passed which tried to make the tobacco program "no cost"--that is, the costs of the program were borne by the tobacco industry, at least in theory--some dispute over the accounting for administrative functions. 

That was a while ago, and the meme about USDA supporting tobacco had dwindled almost to nothing.  Dwindled at least until today, when some Senators have discovered that RMA/FCIC subsidizes crop insurance for tobacco and are hoping to amend the farm bill to prohibit that.

All cynicism aside, I can't disagree with them.  When pot is legalized, I would firmly oppose offering crop insurance for it.

Early Playing: Baseball Factoids

Ran across two factoids today:

Mr. Cabrera is on the list of people who hit the most homers by the time they were 30.   What's sort of surprising is two of the people started their major league careers at 17 (Mel Ott and  Jimmie Foxx)  And two of the three top hitters aren't on the list of 12 top hitters at all: Babe Ruth (started off pitching) and Barry Bonds (started off clean). Hat Tip owed, perhaps to Powerline.

And the Texans, who are always biggest, best and first, also were playing baseball before the Civil War, and during.

Maid's Quarters: $1.5 Millon

And that's the low-end.  If you want your maid to have good quarters, you can spend $3.5 million.

But your wine can be housed for a mere $158,000.

All of this from this graphic in the NYTimes, accompanying an article about the tallest residential building in NYC, now under construction, many of the apartments of which are sold, some to wealthy foreigners.

John Kenneth Galbraith used to have great fun poking at apparent excesses like this; not sure we have anyone like that today.

Use Proportional Spaced Type, Please

The White House released the emails about Benghazi, and Kevin Drum has excerpts.

I'm back on my hobbyhorse: for once and for all, proportional spaced type is more legible than the old monospaced pica and elite type, familiar to some of us from the SmithCorona/Remington days. So why Gen. Petraeus and the NCTC are using monospaced only shows how backward some in the intelligence/foreign affairs community are.  Get with the program, join the 21st century.

Scandals of Yesteryear: Billie Sol Estes, RIP

This has been a week of scandals, or at least supposed scandal.  But they don't do scandals like they used to.  These modern people just have no idea of how to make a scandal and how to cover it.  Let me tell you how it was in my day.

Billie Sol Estes was a real piece of work.  He died the other day, and the Times ran an obit which only touched the surface.  Bloomberg had this piece on him. Robert Caro had a whole chapter on him in his LBJ bio. And he was a cat man.

Who was he?  A wheeler dealer equal to Mark Twain's imagination (remember the King and the Duke in Huckleberry Finn?). He's called "the king of Texas wheeler-dealers", which isn't wrong.

He could call the vasty deep, and they might answer.  (Just so happens the town where he died, Granbury/deCordoba, Texas was just devastated by a tornado. He didn't go quietly into that good night.)

When I arrived at ASCS in 1968, I started to hear of Billie Sol, even though his downfall was 6 years earlier.  Old records were stored in the attic of the South Building,  Most of the records were in old metal file cabinets and accessible to anyone willing to walk up a flight of stairs from the 6th floor and brave the dust and gloom.  But some of the records were under lock and key in the vault; these were sensitive records, probably personnel stuff and perhaps some civil defense material.  The crown jewel, or at least the records which got talked about, were the Billie Sol Estes records. 

There's mention in the wikipedia entry of his buying cotton allotments, though not in the Times obit.  As was explained to me, part of his scheme was to buy cotton allotments in one area of Texas where the yield was low, and transfer them to a county where the yield was high.  So a 100 acre allotment in county A would equate to 300 pounds per acre, where if it was transferred to county B the same 100 acres could grow 600 pounds, and consequently be worth a lot more. My impression was that this was a loophole in the ASCS regs governing allotment transfers, which got plugged later by a rule change (so in my example the county B allotment would be just 50 acres).

When the Billie Sol scandal broke, USDA and ASCS were very much in the limelight, because he had ties to some of the officials (Texas state office, I think, but not sure) and some had to resign.   As I understood, third or fourth hand, in 1962 ASCS had no records system, or at least not an adequate one.  So as investigators tried to piece together what happened they gathered together all the records they could find, which were the ones which ended in the vault.

Now Congress, even though under the control of the Dems, had fun investigating because the blowhards and good government types (not always mutually exclusive types) love the publicity and the feeling of cleaning the Augean stables.  (ed: going overboard here on literary references.)  I'm not sure whether their staff actually saw all the records in the vault, or whether the agency was maybe hiding some.  

I did hear they were very efficient:  the Administrative Services division had two men with somewhat similar last names, one was a GS-9 dealing with property, the other a GS-12 who dealt with records. The Congressional committee hauled the poor property man into their hearing and pestered him with questions about records until they finally figured out they had the wrong man.

Anyhow, one result of the scandal was a very formalized system of recordkeeping for communications with the field, official record copies and finder copies, and a centralized depositary for the records.  Over the years of my career, that system was gradually eroded away, as people lost awareness of the original problem it was created to solve.  And, perhaps even more important, new  new equipment (office copiers and word processing which replaced carbon sets) and new people with new ideas on how to communicate proposals and make decisions took the place of the old hands.

The Idyllic and the Real--Horses and Farming

The Times runs an article today: Farm Equipment That Runs on Oats.

It's about a farm in Vermont, associated with a co-housing collective, doing the locavore/sustainable farming life.  The farmer uses horses for most chores, saving the tractor for "heavy soil".  He and the writer celebrate the emotions of feeling at one with the team, understanding their personalities and ways, etc etc. You may observe from the title and the "etc.s" that the story struck a nerve.

These give the idea:

“People are attracted to the way of working with animals, of being back in touch with nature, of regaining a kind of rhythmic elegance to our lives.”....

Still, this elaborate routine provides the sort of connection to living things that Mr. Leslie believes people today are longing for — and it is why he is convinced that farming with horses will have a real renaissance.

“I think people are hungering for a kind of unplugged reality,” he said. “That leads to a deeper self-understanding.”

It's all fine and dandy for those who want this sort of life, but we had horses for about the first 10 years of my life.  From that jaundiced perspective I'd offer a few observations:

•  The Amish have a sustainable life, but not this family. The farmer and partner have only one child, a girl about 6.  If you're going to have a sustainable way of living you need to have some more children, so at least one will stay on the land.  
• If you're living a locavore life, you don't need much cash, meaning you aren't depositing much into Social Security and Medicare.  So having adult children to support your old age is important.
• One of the downsides of this farming can be observed in the Amish: it tends not to support the ideals of women's liberation.  Because field work is usually more strenuous, the males tend to get stuck with that (in the article it sounds as if the man does communing with the horses though my mother did enjoy driving a team) meaning the females get stuck with the house work. The internal combustion engine and electric motor did much to free women.
• It's dangerous.  Farming is dangerous whatever motive power is used, but I suspect the accident rate was higher in 1930 when horses were predominant than today.  To their credit, the article's author notes a very bad accident with the horses early in the farmer's career which broke both legs of his partner.  It doesn't say how they managed in the months before she was able to do resume her work.

For anyone interested, here's a link to a 1921 Cornell extension study on tractors versus horses.

Counter to NY Times on Pigford

The Federation of Southern Cooperatives has a response to the NYTimes article I linked to previously.

It's a more detailed response than others I've seen.  It ends with a repudiation of one of the figures mentioned in the Times article:

"The Network of Black Farm Groups and Advocates was created at the beginning of the Pigford lawsuit. Tom Burrell, mentioned in the April 26 New York Times article, was never a part of the Network. His Black Farmers and Agriculturalists Association (BFFA) in Tennessee is not the same as the group in North Carolina. Burrell speaks for himself.

Thomas Burrell and his organization never served as representatives of class counsel in the Pigford settlement or the Black Farmers Discrimination Litigation (BFDL), known as Pigford II.

Burrell and his organization were not active in the Pigford claims process, and class

counsel in BFDL has not worked with him or his organization on claims nor accepted any claimshe or his organization might have prepared. In fact, class counsel had reported his activities tothe U.S. District Court in an effort to prevent him from spreading false information about theclaims process, and in opinions rendered on January 3, 2005 and September 6, 2005, DistrictCourt Judge Paul L. Friedman charged that Burrell had “given false hope to thousands of AfricanAmerican farmers.”

What Burrell has done, but which the article does not make clear, is hijack the claims

process for his own self interest. Burrell’s actions have been detrimental to the legitimate claimsprocess, yet the New York Times would have readers believe that those who oversaw the claimsprocess condoned his efforts to undermine the integrity of the process. This is blatantlyfalse. By indicating a connection between Burrell and the claims process, the New York Times is showing a grave disregard for the truth and seriously misleading the public.

"Actively Engaged" Versus "Primary Activity"

Who has it worse--IRS or FSA employees?

Kevin Drum blogs about the problems IRS employees have in determining what "primary activity" means in regards to organizations who try to claim § 501(c)(4) status.  I sympathize, but I believe the controversy and unclarity over what is "actively engaged in farming" for payment limitation purposes trumps the IRS problem.  Come back to me in 28 years and we'll see whether IRS is still grappling with unclear rules.

(BTW, I've not blogged on the new farm bill versions, but it does seem that the Senate version revives last year's clarifications of what counts as actively engaged.  Now if I could only remember what they are, I could save some research.)

Bryce Harper and Pete Reiser

Yes, I'm too young (not a set of words I often write) to remember Pete Reiser in person, but old enough to remember his legend 
a very talented player who kept running into fences and incurring injuries which ruined a promising career.  See this report on Bryce Harper's latest injury. Did I mention the Nats were playing Reiser's old team?

Uniforms, Bands, and Prison

The Post ran an article last week on the proliferation of military camouflage uniforms--our military now has 11 different patterns.  The writer says

"The duplication problem grows out of three qualities that are deeply rooted in Washington. Good intentions. Little patience. And a lust for new turf.
When a bureaucrat or lawmaker sees someone else doing a job poorly, those qualities stir an itch to take over the job."

 Meanwhile, Walter Pincus, who has written for the Post for years, has a vendetta against military bands.  He delights in counting the number of bands the US supports, summing the dollars spent, and comparing it against other public expenditures.

Finally, there was a piece on why a Jewish prisoner ate with the Aryan Brotherhood.

Seems to me there's a common thread here: people seek community, and in part they do so by opposition to others.  So the Marines insert their logo in very fine print on their uniforms, just to make sure no other service will use them.  So each service and command needs its own military band to establish its identity.  After all, the world would come to an end if the Air Force band played "Anchors Aweigh".  And in prison, everyone has to affiliate with one or the other gang, just for safety.

"Lust for new turf"?   Yes.  But even more important is preserving one's old turf.