Government Reorg: Nixon and Taft

A nice recap of past efforts to reorganize the goverment here.at the Monkey Cage by Andrew Rudalevige

I've a particular fondness for the Nixon effort, but hadn't known about Taft's effort (William Howard, that is). Why fondness for Nixon, a man good liberals loved to hate?  May have written this before, but my boss at ASCS was able to get the Directives Branch into IBM MT/ST's (Magnetic Tape/Selectric Typewriters) fairly early.  Somehow the people at the White House learned about the capability, and we were drafted into typing and retyping a document for the proposal.  IIRC it was 100-200 pages, describing the reorganization of cabinet offices into four big departments.  Very hush-hush, and something of a let-down when it fizzled.  I wrote "we"--actually at the time we had two male typists, both good, but who soon left, one for the Army, the other for greener pastures.

Anyhow, the lessons of history do not portend great success for Mr. Kushner.

Tiger Teams and SWAT Teams

Jared Kushner is to be head of an Office of American Innovation.

In my RSS feed I've got a bunch of stories which came in the last few days on the general theme of government reorganization, etc.  I keep thinking I'll gather them all into one piece, but no, this is it.

Back in my Infoshare days the rather charismatic leader of the effort liked to talk about "Tiger Teams", and talented technologists, and other buzzwords of the day.  These days "SWAT Teams" are mentioned more often, but the function is the same: pie in the sky promises of a magic bullet (how many more cliches can I stuff into this post?)

My own feeling is people are bound by habits.  Some things can change habits, as WWII changed German and Japanese habits, or Katrina changed the New Orleans school system but mostly people are slow to change and are very inventive finding reasons why a particular change is ill-advised, or just plain wrong.  Now good P.R. can dress up results.  There's a NYTimes piece today which gives Al Gore's Reinventing Government effort some praise.  Me, I don't believe it, not fully  One of his biggies was reducing layers of supervision, which was mostly accomplished in ASCS by paper changes or ignoring the mandates.

So, as to Mr. Kushner, count me skeptical.

The Fun of Polarization

Vox reports on a study of our polarization into blue and red nations, a study which seems to say that social bubbles on the internet aren't the big cause.  Those with lesser access to the internet are more polarized, meaning especially the old geezers among us are especially partisan.

I can sort of understand that; although I don't interact with my high school classmates (I  should but don't) I see what some of them post on Facebook and they're mostly on the right, the far right.

The person who ran the study suspects that polarization is " result of deeper divisions within American society" as the piece summarizes his views.

I wonder though.  Maybe the bottom line on polarization is simple: it's fun.  After all, affiliating with one of the parties provides people with someone to idolize and someone to hate, and an unending flow of stimuli to elicit feelings of hate and love.

Make Love, Not War?

Kottke has a post with this timeline map of the global median age from 1960 to 2060.  It's interesting to see the various countries aging at different rates, until many of the OECD countries are median age of 50+.

But what's also striking is the correlation of young countries with unrest and war.  For example, today the media age of Iraq, Afghanistan and a country in Central America (likely Guatemala) is in the teens.  The other such countries are in central Africa.

So maybe the slogan of the 60's should have read: "make love and war", or "make love amidst war"?

Drum's TrumpamaCare Compromise

I hope my fellow liberals are not so stuck in opposition that they wouldn't be open to a compromise on healthcare similar to that outlined by Kevin Drum.  I fear though that we are, though my fears are somewhat assuaged by the idea that Trump will never go for it. But maybe I underestimate him?

Why Big Farms

This Successful Farming piece on big farms:

A quarter-century ago, small farms generated 46% of U.S. agricultural production. Today, the powerhouse of production is the large family farm with more than $1 million a year in gross cash farm income (GCFI). They represented 2.9% of the U.S. farm total in 2015 but were responsible for 42% of ag output, say USDA economists James MacDonald and Robert Hoppe.

 And the midpoint for cropland has moved from 589 to 1234 in the 30 years from 1982 to 2012.

Why is that?   Illinois extension has interesting graphs, relating the cost of machinery per acre to the size of the farm; in other words the way increasing the land farmed spreads machinery costs over more land.

This has been true since farming began, and more so the more farmers invest in equipment.

Tax Reform Easier Than Obamacare Repeal?

Secretary of the Treasury Mnuchin is optimistic about getting tax reform done by August--he says:

""We're able to take the tax code and redesign things, and I think there is very, very strong support," he said. "I think in healthcare, it's [a] much, much more complicated issue, where you start out with ObamaCare, which had all these issues, and you're trying to kind of get rid of it and make changes simultaneously.""

Minority Leader Pelosi was talking "rookie day" yesterday, mocking the difficulties the Republicans were having with healthcare.  I'd call Mnuchin another "rookie", given his optimism.  I remember the problems Reagan had in the 1980's with his tax reform, back in the days when he had Sen. Bill Bradley and Rep. Danny Rostenkowski in Congress to get the necessary Democratic votes.  Even with those advantages there was a lot of cliff hanging and logrolling and the final package came up short of the initial promises.

Remember, while healthcare affects 1/6 of the economy, taxes affect the whole thing.
 

Immigrants and Produce Production

When I was young during the summer when we'd drive to Greene for livestock feed, we'd see an old bus parked by the fields bordering the Chenango river, fields in which grew green beans, a bus which provided transport for those Negroes (as we said then) who picked the beans.  It was a moment of quickly passing contact with another world, strange to a child of dairy/poultry farmers. I've no idea where the pickers spent the night, presumably a tent or the bus.

These days the people who harvest our fruits and vegetables are almost all immigrants, mostly undocumented.  That leads to multiple issues, as described in this good Tamar Haspel piece for the Post.  If undocumented immigrants are deported and Trump's wall is built and is effective (big "ifs"), will citizens fill their places?  Could higher wages attract enough workers? Or would innovation come to the rescue, providing machinery and robots to do the harvesting, perhaps at the cost of changing the nature of the produce?

Virginians Steal Pennsylvanian Glory

I've a ggggrandfather who served in the Revolution in the Pennsylvania militia.  While other researchers have come up with the idea he was at Valley Forge, the best I can determine is he may have commanded a company of York militia guarding prisoners from Burgoyne's army. 

Kenneth Roberts wrote some popular historical fiction about the Revolution, and Washington Irving wrote a two-volume bio of George Washington, both of which praised the "Virginia riflemen", often under Morgan.  But J.L. Bell at Boston 1775 suggests cautiously that history may have gotten it wrong, that there were more Pennsylvanian riflemen than Virginians.

Innovation in Farming: Software and Tractors

Farmer populism shows its face in a revolt against John Deere's attempt to protect its software running its tractors.  See this piece.