Jane Smiley is an award-winning novelist; her book "A Thousand Acres" is King Lear updated to 1980's Iowa. Here she reviews "Bet the Farm", describing a couple's return to an Iowa farm owned by her father-in-law. It came out last year. Smiley's review annoys me, but I did put a hold on it with the Fairfax library.
I wonder if there any good books by someone who's been farming their entire life, doing it full time without a sideline providing cash income?
The title is a phrase from a libertarian team's take on how to improve our politics and government. It's mentioned in passing as self-evident truth, without any suggestions that I see to make Congress more effective.
I take exception, of course. I am, after all, a bureaucrat.
The problem is not runaway agencies, not usually, but the failure of Congress to act so they either:
An ex-Marine writes here about the difficulties in properly cleaning/maintaining weapons. I wasn't a Marine, but the piece seems valid to me.
It struck a chord because I remember the captured soldier in the early days of the Iraq war. For a while she was made an icon of the fighting woman. Eventually it turned out that her weapon jammed so she never fought. I had sympathy for her. I don't think I ever cleaned my weapon in Vietnam. As a matter of fact, there was a screwup in getting my departure orders to me, so it was a mad dash to get to Camp LBJ and go through out-processing, one step of which was turning in my weapon. When I tried to, the guy (spec-4 maybe?) refused to take it until I cleaned it. I tried to explain the situation, my flight was due out shortly, but he was adamant. Finally I threw some money at him >$50<$100 and he agreed to take it.
I made my flight.
(It seems possible that the Russian soldiers fighting in the Ukraine have been as lax in their maintenance as I was. )
Vox has a discussion of the student loan forgiveness program. It seems to me there's a parallel between this program and proposal for reparations, most notably reparations to black Americans.
In both cases, at least part of the rationale is to redress wrongs which people have suffered in the past, and to recognize and mitigate the damage currently being suffered. (There is a difference--in the case of slavery the people who would receive the benefits would be the descendants of those wronged; in the case of student loans those who took out the loans would receive the forgiveness. I'm assuming the death of the borrower wipes out the loan obligations, which isn't totally clear.)
In both cases, there's the problem of fixing the problem which caused the damage. In the case of loan forgiveness, it may have been a bad loan from the start, based on fraud or misjudgment by the lender or the borrower. Or it may have turned bad by subsequent events--illness of the borrower, economic hardship, failure of the college, etc. In the case of slavery the damages resulting from slavery have carried forward.
Biden seems to be trying to correct the problems in student loans, although I get the idea there's skepticism about the effectiveness. So there's the fear that students will end up with bad loans in the future, and that colleges will raise tuition anticipating future forgiveness. In the case of reparations it's not clear to me that the various proposals really address the ongoing problems. IMO that's the big weakness of reparations.
A Mickey Mantle baseball card in great shape sold for some millions of dollars the other day.
I remember my baseball card collection, based on buying bubble gum at the corner store. I don't remember whether there were three sheets of gum and one card or vice versa, or some other ratio. Anyhow I had a stack of cards maybe 3 inches high, many of which were Wayne Terwilligers (just because that's the way they did the cards--those for the best players were the rarest).
I did have a Mickey Mantle card. I think it must have either a 1952 or 1953 card because it included the fact that he had been sent down to the Royals, which was 1951. I think my cards were Topps, which started its baseball cards in 1952.
I was a Yankees fan (the local baseball team, the Triple Cities Triplets was a Class A farm club); more importantly my sister was a Dodgers fan so I could only be a Giants or Yankees fan. I liked the card, but there was something different about it. Perhaps it was a Bowman card rather than Topps. I don't know. I definitely didn't get it from a bubble gum package.
The other thing which sticks in memory is condition: if the $12 million card grades 9.5 out 10, mine would have graded .1 out of 10. I believe I was given it by my friend, Van M., perhaps because he had a better version. Mine was crinkled and folded, with ragged edges.
At some point I outgrew the collection, which faded away like all such things.
Both software (i.e., Word) and devices (i.e., smart TV's) have too many options for an old man to understand.
For example, we donate to WETA, meaning we can access PBS Passport streaming service. I figured out how to do that on our PCs, though I never can remember how to get to it from the web site--the design sucks. For 3 years we've had a Samsung smart TV. But it's taken until today for me to figure out how to link up our weta account with the smart TV so we can see the old PBS shows on the TV.
Lesson: don't grow old.
Matt Yglesias had a tweet:
A weird fact about the US government is the Department of Education isn’t allowed to just access the IRS data to determine which of its borrowers are eligible for forgiveness and then do the forgiveness.
— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) August 26, 2022
He got a lot of replies, including one from me. I'll embed it when it pops up in my profile.
I think there's a spectrum of political change/reform, perhaps along more than one dimension, but at least one--scope.
For example, Biden's forgiveness of student loans is big in scope. I'd guess it's one of the biggest changes in the student loan program in recent years. (IIRC the Obama administration did some significant changes, moving more to a government-administered program.)
LBJ's Medicare/Medicaid program was very big in scope. In the years since there have been smaller changes: the biggest I recall now is GWB's addition of Medicare option D--the drug coverage. Previously there was GHWB's catastrophic insurance, which got repealed rather quickly.
But it seems most changes in programs occur with smaller scope and less attention--the slow and steathy path.
When I see the President's announcement, my Calvinism kicks in, and I'm reminded of a quote, possibly apocryphal, from Calvin Coolidge during a controversy about the repayment of our loans to the Allies in WWI which in turn was dependent on Germany's ability and willingess to pay war reparations: "they hired the money, didn't they"?
The financing of my own college education was in a world long ago and far away, so it's irrelevant to today's issues. (Though it turns out the student loan program started in 1958 as part of our response to Sputnik.)
When I met my wife she was still burdened by her college loans, which she finally paid off.
As I tweeted, I'm in agreement with Kevin Drum's point of yesterday--what about the future: has the loan program been changed/reformed/revamped so that the moral basis for forgiving current loans won't apply in the future? As I said, my inner Calvinism is at play--we need to treat current students and future students equitably, or at least with our eyes wide open that we're being inequitable.
(The last point reminds of the lasting complaint which resulted from the mid-80's changes to Social Security--I forget the details but a small category felt they were treated unfairly.
Matt Yglesias has a discussion here. I like it.
A note on a related issue: as I understand the Inflation Reduction Act it raises much of its revenue by taking really big corporations on their profits as shown by their public accounting, what they show to their stockholders. I've always resisted the idea that people could have two different sets of accounts, one for stockholders, one for the tax collector. I understand--whenever we mess with the tax code to allow special deductions in order to push something we like (such as investing in low-income areas of a city, etc), we deviate from my ideal.
