Drum and the IRS Oversight Issue

Kevin Drum posts on the IRS oversight of nonprofits I visited earlier.

Ten Percent More for Humanity?

Modern Farmer has a report by Dan Nosowitz on an analysis of the costs of California's law effectively outlawing caged hens.

As a result, prices of local eggs did indeed increase: there was about a 30 percent spike right at the beginning of the law’s implementation. But that very quickly lessened: prices stabilized after about 22 months at roughly 9 percent higher than their pre-law rates. In all, the study estimates that each household spent about $7.40 per year during that time frame more than they would have had the laws not been passed. (This is a very tricky bit of math given that egg prices weren’t exactly normal during this time thanks to big droughts and avian flu outbreaks.) Now that things have stabilized, that’s much lower; according to USDA figures, prices have settled at a premium of about 15 cents per dozen. For context, during this spike, the average American household spent $6,224.00 per year on food. Yes, people are on a wide variety of budgets, but in the grand scheme of things, this seems insignificant.

 He interviews people who say 10 percent is important, but "insignificant" is where he comes down.

I'll take my usual positions: "it depends" and "it's complicated".

10 percent more for eggs isn't that big a deal, but suppose we apply "humane" rules or laws to all of farming--meaning more pay for migrant workers, better conditions for animals, more diversity in crop farming and the result is 10 percent for food.  (That's probably not a good comparison--most food has been processed in some way but eggs less so.)  Are we ready to approve a 10 percent increase in food stamps?  I think not.  On the other hand, we're ready to approve more than 10 percent increase in the cost of smoking, even though we know smokers tend to have lower incomes. 

Dems and Puerto Rico

If people are and will be leaving Puerto Rico for the mainland because of Maria, it behooves the Democrats to welcome them and persuade them to vote in next year's election. 

[Updated--turns out I'm late--see this piece for an extensive consideration of migration from PR, including possible political impacts.]

Where Are the Immigrants When You Need Them?

Those happy few who watched David Simon's Treme on post-Katrina New Orleans will remember a bit, not quite a subplot, about immigrants coming into New Orleans to participate in the cleanup and rebuilding.  I thought of that when I saw this piece.  

Though it focuses on labor shortages and wage rates, it doesn't mention the incentive for increased immigration.  But the higher the wages in the construction industry, the more benefit to immigrating.

IRS Bureaucrats Did Some Things Right

According to a Politico report the IG, IRS bureaucrats applied heightened scrutiny to some liberal nonprofits on much the same basis as they did to conservative ones: looking at clues from their titles and connections.  The conventional wisdom, as I understand it, is this is wrong, wrong, wrong.  Every nonprofit should get the same amount of scrutiny, and using clues is akin to racial profiling.

This is the issue the Republicans made hay out of in the Obama administration, doing several Congressional investigations,  forcing Lois Lerner to retire, and calling for criminal prosecutions.  I didn't spend much time delving into the details, but I still want now to state two positions:

• if you don't have unlimited resources, it's good bureaucratic strategy to focus your efforts.  That's the theory Obama used in establishing DACA, and it applies for more than just prosecutorial  work. So to me it was perfectly rational for the IRS bureaucrats to devote more attention to groups linked to the Tea Party and to Acorn, than a nonprofit set up to fund local recreational facilities, for example.   I agree it would be bad if the bureaucrats showed a partisan bias, but based on the Politico report it seems they didn't.
• the problem, as it so often is, is Congress in writing a bad law, made worse by bad decisions in the past.  As I understand it, nonprofits can receive tax-exempt donations only if they're not "political ."  What does "political" mean--Congress didn't give a definition and IRS has in the past permitted "some" activity which would seem to a layman to be political, expanding more recently to be less than 50 percent.   That means IRS has to examine the nonprofit in depth, which requires resources, which gets back to the need to focus their attention.

Seems to me it would be better to  worry about interlocking directorates and size of the effort.  Go after the big boys.

Our Morning Hate

Orwell's 1984 featured a Two-Minute Hate, in which the whole society shared a two-minute spasm of hate of their enemy, every day at the same time.   I guiltily thought of that after a few minutes sharing our opinions of our President with a relative, with whom I chat most days.

(This follows an observation yesterday of a headline on the Washington Times website to the effect that the media was biased against Trump: only 11 percent of coverage was positive.  IMHO that means the coverage is fair; he does okay about a tenth of the time, when he's reading from a teleprompter.)

Automated Crop Appraisals?

Crop insurance relies on crop appraisers to sample an acreage of disaster-affected crops and project the reduction in yield which will occur.  It looks as if automated intelligence may be on the way to assist in the job, if not eventually to replace appraisers.  The first crop: cassava.  From Technology Review:

"Some cassava farmers may not be able to tell one plant’s debilitating brown streak from another’s troubling brown leaf spot—but a smartphone-friendly AI can.
Wired reports that researchers have developed a lightweight image-recognition AI that can identify diseases in the cassava plant based on pictures of its leaves. That could be useful, because cassava is one of the most commonly eaten tubers on the planet, but is grown predominantly in developing countries where access to expertise to diagnose unusual crop problems may be limited."

Life Used To Be Better

This can't be dismissed as nostalgia.  Growing up I remember being able to see stars at night, even the Milky Way. Now if you're Kevin Drum you have to travel to Ireland to see it.

Don't know if it's significant but mentions of the Milky Way have declined significantly since the 19th century according to Google Ngrams

Vietnam on TV and in Iraq and Afghanistan

Have now watched most of the Burns/Novick Vietnam series (missing the first one but I'd just completed the Lagevall book) and the last minutes of the longer episodes.  Had my memory refreshed but didn't learn a lot that was new, given that I'd lived through the period, following the media closely, and ended up in Vietnam for a shortened tour (11 months/11 days).  That's my general take, but I did learn more about the divisions in the North's leadership, i.e, the role of Le Duan.

While I found the range of individual stories and responses on the American and South Vietnamese side to be familiar, the stories from the other side were newer, particularly when critical.

Came close to tears twice, once when an American recounted his first glimpse of women in ao dais

which tracked my reactions when arriving in the early morning at Tan San Nhut airport, once in reaction to the piece on the Vietnam War Memorial. 

I'd say the series missed a couple areas which seem important to me, but which aren't the focus. 

One is the ways in which Vietnamese and American societies started to intermix and separate.  The usual way in which this gets covered is prostitution, with the real blend of the offspring of Americans and Vietnamese.  That got mentioned in the series.  But the blending, the intermixture was more than that.  As soon as Americans arrived, we started hiring help, slowly at first but then more and more.  For example by the time I left in May 67 we had barbers, laundry workers, hootch girls, generator helpers (don't know their exact title, but they helped with the generators), and others which time has erased.  Also mentioned briefly in the series was the black market.  I remember buying my jungle boots (with canvas uppers instead of leather as in the standard issue boots) through the black market--more comfortable than the regular boots but at that time restricted only to combat troops.  In both cases, as in our Afghanistan war, the influx of American money had a great impact on the Vietnamese economy and on the people--some good, some bad.  (Not a new phenomenon--recall the complaints of the Brits in WWII--Yanks were overpaid, over-sexed, and over here.)  

The blending, the intermixture, was accompanied by increasing separation.  When I arrived we were operating generators in compounds in Saigon.  I was then stationed at Long Binh, the main logistical base outside Saigon where we did our best to separate from Vietnamese society--we ended up with aluminum hootches on concrete pads, not the tents we started with.   Think of the "Green Zone"  

in Baghdad.  The logic is understandable: we don't want our soldiers killed so the best way to do that is to isolate them. 

The other point not covered was standard in accounts of the war: the fact that most troops were REMF's, as I was.  Lots to be said about that, but not today. 

Grain Surpluses

Illinois farm Policy News reports that 2017 is going to be another year of more grain produced than consumed, the fourth year in a row.

And when focusing on U.S. farmers, the Reuters article explained that, “Even as farmers reap bountiful harvests, U.S. net farm incomes this year will total $63.4 billion – about half of their earnings in 2013, according to a U.S. Department of Agriculture forecast.

20 years ago I predicted grain surpluses once the Russians and Ukrainians got going.  So I was right, right, right!  Just didn't realize they'd be so slow about it.