Lots of speculation already about politics in 2024, particularly the presidential race and control of Congress.
I'll venture a prediction of my own. The Grim Reaper will have a say. We have an old President, an old fomer guy, and a bunch of old people in Congress. Between now and November 2024 one or more of these geezers is going to kick the can which will significantly change the odds of an important outcome.
When my first boss in ASCS sent me to NC for a month to get a taste what state and county offices did, and farmer fieldmen (as district directors were called then), I spent a week in Halifax county IIRC. The CED was sharp. It was fall so operations were slower. One day he took me out into the field, perhaps doing a spot check, don't remember. But we stopped at a sawmill. It had a machine, a lathe perhaps, for shaving a thin layer of wood from a rotating log. Fascinating, as I'd never seen it before. I think the wood shavings were cut into strips which were then woven into wooden baskets.
We weren't there to look at the operation, but to get one of the workers to sign up for cost-sharing under the then Agricultural Conservation Program. What was the practice? A cover crop. (Cover crops were, I think, particularly popular in the South, where there had been a lot of erosion of worn-out cotton land.)
ACP was established in the New Deal, but by 1969 it was under attack. Republicans, led by Secretary of Agriculture Butz, argued that some, or perhaps all of the practices, increased the productivity of farms, and, therefore the farmers could and should find the practices worthwhile enough to finance and install on their own, without the carrot of a government cost-share. They also argued that items such as liming were the result of lobbying by the industry.
There was a lot of back and forth over the fate of ACP between the Nixon administration and Congress, where the House was controlled by Democrats throughout. In the end the program was cut back, both by reducing appropriations and by inflation, and the cover crop practice and liming were eliminated.
IMO the Butz expectation that rational self-interest would be sufficient to perpetuate widespread cover crops was disproved by the results.
I like this part of the IRA, but I'm dubious that H&RBlock and Intuit will ever be beaten, at least not without a drastic change in American politics.
The Times has a table describing what's in the Inflation Reduction Act. Somehow though they miss the two provisions for farmers on farm debt relief.
Secretary Vilsack has a press release praising the act. He too ignores the farm debt provisions.
Ancestry.com analyzes saliva samples from their customers to provide information back to them. In my case they've been reasonably accurate on ancestry (German and Scots-Irish, mostly) with no particular results of interest on potential health concerns. Today they added an assessment of risk-taking. I'm shocked, shocked to learn than I'm more risk-adverse than 60 percent of the population.
Personally, I'd rate myself as more adverse than 90 percent.
Much to the disgust of my wife I'm reading Kellyanne Conway's book, Here's the Deal. It's quite readable. It would be one hundred pages shorter if all the people's names were excised. She's obviously a people person, a networker.
Two points of interest so far (just at 2016 now):
I'm with Doggett on the problem of fraud possibly being enabled by telehealth.
I've been bothered by TV ads I see for various devices which support health--the claim is usually to the effect that the cane or walker or whatever is "free", because Uncle will pay for it.
A couple random thoughts. The former guy and some of his defenders claim he declassified documents even though (presumably) the bureaucratic process to do so was not completed. For a document to be classified, it has to be marked as "Confidential", "Secret", "Top Secret" or whatever, so to be declassified the marking has to be superseded by another marking: "Declassified" and the date and authority. (This is my understanding). So using Trump's theory, you can't prosecute someone for mishandling secrets, such as a Reality Winner without an affidavit from the President asserting he or she has not declassified the document?
While NARA rebutted Trump's claim that Obama had 33 million documents, I'm betting Obama actually has documents/records he shouldn't have, according to some lawyers.
I go back to Apollo 11, the moon landing, and the other astronauts. Years after their exploits we learned that astronauts made and kept, or sold, souvenirs of their flights. Obama is human, so I'm sure he has some personal souvenirs of his time in the office. Perhaps GWB's note to him in the Resolute desk or whatever, something which could qualify as an official document.
I've reservations about the Democratic spin on the "87,000 agents" in IRA, as described here, specifically the idea that the new hires are, in part, replacing present employees who will retire over the next 10 years. I haven't seen the IRS report which is the basis for the 87,000 claim, but normally I'd think the baseline for an agency for the next 10 years would include funding for employees at the current level.
If the IRS has currently 100,000 employes (this Post piece says 80,000) and half will retire over 10 years, that would mean to me that IRS employment would increase by 37,000 because of IRA.
I've reservations on the CBC's estimates of their added collections as well. I bet the first thing the Republicans do when they gain the House, Senate, or Presidency is to use that leverage to negotiate a cut in IRS employment. (Of course, CBC can't be that cynical.)
Finished Sec. Esper's book. One point I think worthy of commenting. Esper, along with Gen. Milley, found the former guy to be very erratic, often reacting to what he saw on Fox or heard from his last contact, and sometimes with highly unrealistic ideas of what could be accomplished (as in withdrawals from Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Africa).
According to Esper they often challenged Trump's wild hairs by raising lots of questions, often on the logistics of implementation, sometimes on legal issues involving internatonal law or the law of war. That reaction accounts for Trumpians concerns over the "deep state" stalling.
Elsewhere I recently ran across a description of how environmentalists and NIMBY types delay and delay proposals for new pipelines (like the one Sen. Manchin got fast tracked as part of the IRA deal) by continually raising questions and legal issues.
So, I like Esper's questions, but am less enthusiastic about NIMBYism. Where do you draw the line, can you, between valid issues and stalling? Because a new project involves unknowns, questions are inevitable and you can never resolve them all.
