USDA Statistics Suck

You'd think having spent my career in USDA I'd have a good grasp of how to navigate the USDA statistics.

You'd be wrong.  Perhaps the problem is increasing senility.  I prefer to believe the problem is that USDA's statistical apparatus is stuck in the middle of the last century, pre-computer.

What's most recently teed me off is dairy (see my previous post).  I'm looking for a relatively simple set of figures: the historical number of dairy farms, 190xx to present; the number of cows, and total production for the same period.  Then I could match trends to the New Zealand figures.

USDA has two main statistical agencies: NASS (National Agricultural Statistics Service) and ERS (Economic Research Service).  In addition, if you're looking for figures on foreign ag, FAS (Foreign Agricultural Service) might come into play.  If you're looking for some figures on farm programs, FSA comes into play.

Problem is I've yet to figure out how to get these figures.  The NASS data seems tied to censuses. The best I've done is this ERS document

I think the basic problem is the statistical series have developed in close conjunction with users in the colleges and industry, so satisfying the needs of John Doe Public was a low priority.  Back in the days of paper, before the internet, people wouldn't be coming to the agencies just to satisfy their curiosity.

Sharecropping and Sharemilking

I read a Forbes article suggesting the end to farm programs, pointing to New Zealand as an example of that policy.  One of the effects was the claim: "The effects? New Zealand retained 99 percent of its farms."  That raised my contrarian hackles.  In trying to find substantiation I ran across this interesting concept: "sharemilking".  The farmer owns and milks the cows, and moves them from one farm to another on "Gypsy Day".

I assume by separating land ownership and cow ownership the capital requirements are lowered.  I haven't heard of this before, but I suspect there may be such arrangements in the U.S., particularly as part of a succession plan.

As for the Forbes article, while it claims support from an "academic study", in fact the article, while by an academic, is more of a blog post; itself supported by only one article.  I'm suspending judgment on the issue--perhaps I'll get the ambition to do more research.

Marx, Jefferson, and Jesus

From a piece on the prohibition movement:

"Prohibition was not solely an evangelical movement, but rather an economic, political and cultural coalition of Marx, Jefferson and Jesus."

 Read the whole thing.

The Deer from My Window

I'm not the photographer Kevin Drum is, but I do have wildlife I can see from my living room window, much to the detriment of our hostas.

Clovis Piece

Politico has a piece on Sam Clovis, which is surprisingly positive.

Improper Payments and Election Fraud

GovExec has a piece on a proposed commission to look at steps to reduce improper payments.  It's good, but I'd like to make a connection to another issue: election fraud.

The piece includes this sentence: "The example he recommended is easing the current restriction in the Social Security Act that prevents the Treasury Department’s Fiscal Bureau from readily accessing the Death Master File for privacy reasons."  It goes on to note that IRS uses its databases to vet 87 percent of all federal payments.

A major problem in improper payments is knowing when your intended payee is dead. Perhaps the payment should go to the estate  (usual in the case of farm programs) or should not be paid at all.

A major problem in keeping voter eligibility files current is knowing when the previously registered voter has died.

By improving the IRS process by allowing access to the Death Master File (as opposed, IIRC, to using less accurate data from SSA) and using that process for both payments and voter eligibility we kill two birds with one stone.

Electric Cars Don't Need More Generating Capacity?

From a Technology Review piece skeptical of Elon Musk's ambitions:

A 2007 study by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory found that without adding a new plant or transmission line, the U.S. grid could reliably charge 84 percent of the nation’s cars, pickups, and SUVs.

Without reading the study I understand the logic: lots of 24-hour generating capacity goes unused at night.  The cost would be for the fuel, coal or natural gas, to run it, but not the capital expense of building new generators.  (Though a 10-year old study might be somewhat out of date.)

Administrative Procedures and Trump

This ThinkProgress post represents one of the hurdles for the Trump revolution:  simply put, once a regulation is in place, the bureaucracy has to use the Administrative Procedure Act to revise/change/revoke it, including cost/benefit analysis and consideration of public comment.  (There are exceptions to this, of course, and I'm specifying "the bureaucracy" since Congress can change the game, but it's a good general rule.)  In the case of the Clean Water Rule, a judge has found EPA and Corps of Engineers to be rushing too fast (because it's not a simple case, other court cases involved) in their analysis.

How the Brits Do Government IT

The blog.Gov.uk site is the blog for the UK government, as you might guess.  It's interesting to follow the posts, seeing some of the differences and some of the similarities between British IT and US IT.  The British government is a lot more centralized than the US, both at the national level with its civil service setup which uses more cross-department transfers than the US (SES was supposed to incorporate that, but doesn't really), and in the structure of local government--no federalism.

Even though their IT efforts seems to follow the same pattern, with more basic applications being shared across departments, they still have silos.  An excerpt:

"We transitioned 300+ websites onto one platform in 15 months. That meant we didn’t have the time or the opportunity to look properly at how that content fitted together.
And because each organisation’s website moved on to GOV.UK separately, that content came onto the site siloed and has remained siloed. And there are now more than 300,000 individual items on GOV.UK."

Clovis Redux

The appointment of Sam Clovis might be in trouble, as he had an interview in 2014 in which he was critical of crop insurance, which has become the basic safety net program for crop farmers.

Interesting times ahead. (I predict he'll backtrack and the Senate will confirm.)