Liberals Are Cheap

Kevin Drum admits he's an idiot and his commenters chime in noting how they drive cheap old cars.

Mankiw and I: CEO/Worker Compensation Ratios

Greg Mankiw, Harvard economics professor and adviser to Mitt Romney, posts a chart on his blog showing the ratio between the pay of a worker and the pay/compensation of the CEO's at top 350 firms.  (I assume the workers are the workers at the same firms, but whether it's mean or median or what, it's not clear--Prof Mankiw gets a "C" for copying the graph and failing to specify in his post.)

The professor seems must struck by the recent drop in CEO compensation--the ratio in 2000 was twice that in 2011.  I'm more struck though by the increase, the ratio has increased 10 times between 1965 and 2011. In the good old days just after George Romney had left his CEO job at American Motors CEO's got roughly 20 times the compensation of their employees, say $100,000 to $5,000; in the bad new days when his son is running for President CEO's in big companies make 209 times the compensation of employees. 

Cocoa Pops Is the Answer

What is the question: how did Baratunde Thurston climb his way up?

India Sets a Record

This article reports India has set a new record for production of wheat, rice, and cotton.

India will have a all-time high foodgrain production of over 252 million tonne in FY12 with a record output of wheat, rice and cotton, Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar said today.
Replying to supplementaries during Question Hour in Rajya Sabha, he said the record foodgrain production of 252.56 million tonne would be higher than the 235.88 million tonne output in FY11.

Political Advertising in the Colonies

Boston 1775 has a guest blogger discussing "milestones"; no, not as in project planning but as in physical stones which mark the miles from a given point, in this case in Boston. An excerpt to explain the title:

Rather, most of the stones in the immediate Boston area were erected by prominent political figures, such as Samuel Sewall, Jonathan Belcher, and Paul Dudley. I’m guessing that those men saw the milestones partly as a public service, and partly as a billboard advertising their beneficence—just as we see signs near highway construction projects that give the names of government officials today.

 

The Life of Chinese Workers

Via Ann Althouse, a series of photos of the walled city of Kowloon,

Where Are All the Prairie Potholes?

I've blogged before on the prairie potholes, most recently here.  EWG has a set of maps which outline the pothole region, as well as where grassland and wetland have been converted to active cropland recently.

Note my use of "active"--that's because by definition every acre in the Conservation Reserve Program once was cropped/considered by FSA/ASCS to be cropland.

We're a Rich Country

I don't know why, but the idea of retirement homes for urban chickens past their egg-laying days strikes me as ridiculous, while the idea of retirement homes for former thoroughbred race horses doesn't, particularly.

Maybe because I liked our horses but disliked our chickens.

Conservation Compliance Overview from CRS

Via STu Ellis at farmgate, here's the latest CRS summary of conservation compliance. A good overview for Congress, but doesn't break new ground for me except:

• seeing the reduction in soil erosion since 1985.
• noting that OIG was doing a 2-phase review of it, the first phase was in 2008, no report has been issued on the second phase yet.  (Who polices the policeman?)

Budget Baselines

Via EWG, here's the Congressional Research Service's discussion of the budget baseline for the next farm bill.  It shows a baseline of $90 billion over the next 10 years for crop insurance, including roughly $1.3/4 billion in delivery expenses.  Interestingly, the administrative expenses for NRCS and FSA aren't included in the discussion.