Closing Offices--NRCS

This press report says four NRCS offices are recommended for closure.

Fear the Model Bureaucrat

As in all things, knowledge is power, which means one should be careful of those who excel, particularly those who have mastered the art of faking sincerity. Slightly less dangerous are model bureaucrats, such as this one in Cleveland:

Juanita Myrick got her first job with county human services as a records clerk and quickly devoted herself to the patron saint of government: paperwork. Over the next 17 years, she became the mistress of meticulous documentation -- of clients, welfare checks, case evaluations. No detail was too mundane to escape her.

Having Fun, Ken Cook and EWG

Now that EWG has the database of farm payment beneficiaries up and running (something my old co-workers at USDA couldn't get done :-) ), Ken Cook is having fun by linking the payment data to to geography--in his most recent posts he's shown the people who live in Key West and in San Francisco who benefit from farm program payments.

This is called "rabble-rousing", at least when one's opponents do it. When the good guys do it, it's called alerting the people to injustices.

EWG's Database

Both EWG and the press are pushing the availability of data on who might be benefiting from farm payments. Their old database showed whose name was on the check, the new one (the one that USDA couldn't figure out how to make available online) shows the beneficiaries (i.e., members of estates, stockholders of corporations, etc.). I haven't seen the data myself--I suspect it'd be best to wait a couple days until the initial burst of activity dies down.

If Charlie Stenholm (former blue-dog Dem Representative from Texas defeated by Mr. DeLay's redistricting scheme) is right, and EWG doesn't give the data a fair shake, one wonders why the farm state legislators didn't make sure that USDA put the data up. Maybe they didn't think that far ahead, or maybe they just didn't know technology that well.

Two Bureaucrats Marry

The (former) richest man in the world now has a bureaucrat as a son-in-law:

Brunei Sultan's daughter married a civil servant yesterday in a glittering traditional ceremony.

Unfair Attacks

My wife and I went to the Kennedy center last night for the last ballet of our subscription. Although we've had hot weather already this year, the humidity wasn't bad so it was pleasant. We were on the terrace, overlooking the Potomac. (Isn't that where Captain John Smith sailed 400 years ago?) Discussed the father of a friend, who may have Alzheimer's (or micro-strokes), who was described as getting upset and irritable when things were going on that he didn't understand.

Since I'm paranoid about Alzheimers, I tried making the joke that the same description could readily apply to me. My everloving wife replied: for you, it's a character trait, not an indication of Alzheimers. :-(

How Does Canada Do It? II

An email piqued my interest on what farm programs Canada has and how they are administered. The big one is:

"Beginning 2003 the Canadian Agricultural Income Stabilization (CAIS) program replaces previous safety net programs available to producers. (Farm Income Disaster Program, Canadian Farm Income Program, Net Income Stabilization Account)" from the Alberta corp.

Some background: Canada has roughly 10 percent of our population and their agriculture is 2 percent of the economy, compared to our 1 percent (CIA factbook). Their federal government is weaker than ours. Their equivalent of USDA has 170 regional offices. Both provinces and federal government have agricultural programs, or rather, the federal government runs the program in some provinces and not in other. The estimated 2007 expenditures are $4,757 million for the federal and $3,127 for the provincial. about half of which is for "farm programs" (i.e., crop insurance, subsidies)

The Ontario USDA is Agricorp.com , and its annual report is interesting. They boast about getting payments out in 6 weeks (not clear whether the comparison should be to our disaster payments or to supplemental counter-cyclical payments) but mourn the fact that processing of CAIS applications is slow. (The CAIS process looks to be more like getting a farmers home plan from the producer and making a grant based on it.)

Their equivalent to the non-recourse commodity loan and purchase program of olden days is called the "Advance Payments Program" and is administered through producer organizations. That's similar to the cotton and rice marketing cooperatives the US uses, and the producer associations for tobacco and peanuts, but apparently Canadian organizations were stronger across the board than in the US.

Alberta also delivers the CAIS through a corporation, which seems to have started as a hail insurance corporation.

We (federal employees) should be glad the Bush administration hasn't picked up on this pattern, otherwise FSA would have been privatized.

Post Front Page--Politics and Reform

The Washington Post has two stories on its front page that relate, in a way. One is the second in its series on the DC school system. Today's is a review of the various efforts to reform the system over the years. Every few years new people come to power promising change and improvement, only to leave sometime later, either slinking out the door tired and defeated or thrown out by a new set of reformers. A theme is the power of the bureaucracy to frustrate change even at the cost of protecting incompetence. Another theme is unanticipated consequences--a court suit ends up depriving the system of money by forcing it to spend $50,000 per special ed student (if my quick math is right--$120 million divided by 2400 students?)

The other story is on the use of political connections to select immigration judges. It seems the Bush administration has been appointing judges with such ties.

What's the relationship? New leadership can exert its influence by appointing its people, as in the case of Bush and immigration judges. When it can't exert influence, as in the case of the DC schools, it can't be held responsible. So, bottom line, there's a case to be made for the old Jacksonian spoils system and against the goo-goo Progressive governmental reform people.

The Melting Pot Bubbles On

Had to laugh today at a piece in the NYTimes Style section, on "A Privileged Life, Celebrating WASP Style: "The pages gleam with iconic photographs of über-WASPs — William F. Buckley, George Plimpton, Jackie Onassis..."

The last I looked, WASP stood for White Anglo-Saxon Protestant; Mr. Buckley is, while an Anglophile, a very prominent Catholic and Jacqueline Bouvier was both Catholic and French. Not that I'd deny any one admission to the WASP club; I just marvel at the power of assimilation--what the economists call the first-mover advantage.

And How the Neighbors to the North Do It

Apparently as a percentage of net sales for most everything, including ostriches. See this news story and this web site on Canada's Cost of Production program to support farmers.

The process is intriguing--I need to look more at Canada's "supply management" program, which apparently still applies to dairy and poultry. And do they have no local offices--is everything done through the Internet?

LRECL and Mark Adamo

There's a recent report of research showing that infants are able to recognize the differences between languages. It's part of the innate and learned ability to categorize the "blooming, buzzing confusion"* of the world into something that makes sense.

Last night my wife and I went to the Kennedy Center for the last NSO concert of the year. Mark Adamo had a concerto for harp, a premiere well reviewed by the Post.

As I was sitting through it, I remembered the COBOL class where I first met my wife, where the instructor explained that computers only read binary, zeroes and ones, and that they had to be told how to handle the stream. LRECL was part of it--defining the logical record length (often a multiple of 80 characters, which was the maximum you could get on a punch card). You'd define the block size, which was how many characters the computer would eat at one gulp, then how many records were in the block--the LRECL, then the fields within the record and their length.

That's what babies do: they separate their experiences into chunks, defining what a word is, then make associations. That's how we learn to identify one cow from another (if you grow up on a small dairy farm) or one person from another, or one language from another.

Or, learn the language of classical music. Unfortunately, I haven't learned to be flexible enough to enjoy Mr. Adamo's concerto, I'm stuck back in the nineteenth century with Mahler's first, which was great.




* William James

The Virtues of Stovepipes

"Stovepipes" have gotten a bad name, both in IT and bureaucratic organization. It means that each organization/program has its own focus, its own data, its own concerns and doesn't share well with others. There's a case to be made in their defense, which is not a case I'll make today. But this article from Government executive, reporting that a subcommittee of the House Ag committee has voted to remove the ag inspectors from Homeland Security and put them back in USDA gives a sense of both the petty politics behind stovepiping and, in the comment, one of the virtues of stovepiping.

Loose Linkage on Immigration--see Passports

The administration has had to back off the rule that travelers within this hemisphere have passports, because the State Department's bureaucracy couldn't handle the backlog of applications. (People waiting until the last minute.) See this Government Executive piece.

That's the sort of thing one could expect if the immigration bill, that seems dead in the water, were to pass. What we could and should be doing is encouraging people to issue, and illegal immigrants to get, any form of ID possible (municipalities, consular ID's, etc.) with the idea that they'd be first in line for any future reform and they wouldn't suffer by doing so. That sort of halfway step is what I mean by loose linkage--easing people into the system, mostly for the benefit of the bureaucrats, but it will also benefit their clients.

Bureaucratic Interns

We die. Unfortunately.

Any self-perpetuating organization needs to recruit those who leave it on their way to the coffin. One way is internship. See Angry Drunk Bureaucrat's take.

(I'm not sure about the carbon paper though--maybe they didn't clean out the supply cabinet.)

Windows Vista and the Bureaucracy

As a result of PC problems, I'm now running Windows Vista (not my choice) and having problems getting old programs that ran under XP to work. So I read today that the Army medics are using software that runs under Windows 2000, and will only have new XP compatible software in 2008.

Our Tolerance Exceeds Our Knowledge

Via Crooked Timber, it seems that 83 percent of the population are okay with interracial dating but 74 percent believe the earth revolves around the sun (as opposed to vice versa or don't know). For someone who believes we're getting more and more knowledge, that's real depressing. But at least we can live together.

D-Day and Responsibility

The Post editorial page today notes June 6 by quoting the announcement that Eisenhower wrote to use if the D-Day landings failed. He took responsibility. The Post thinks it's a good model.

Causes me nostalgia. Perhaps the first "adult" book I ever read was Ike's "Crusade in Europe". It probably was a Christmas present for my father, who was into history and biography, for 1949. I very vaguely remember (I think) my grandfather trying desperately to get the news on our old radio--was it the Battle of the Bulge? Those old vacuum tube radios couldn't get good reception when the station was 10-15 miles away, considering the hills that surrounded us.

He wrote clear prose, not great, and didn't directly reveal how he felt dealing with the prima donas like Monty and Patton. Long before the Holocaust, he wrote about the freeing of prisoners from the concentration camps and included pictures.

I don't know whether it was the atmosphere of the time, knowing the importance the grownups placed on the events, or simply a small boy's fascination with things military, but I read and reread the book over the years.

Immigration and Bureaucracy

Shannon O'Neill calls for: "More attention to functioning bureaucracies and less attention to walls will better address current policy failures." She says the US Citizenship and Immigration Service hasn't been able to process its current workload and won't have the ability to handle workload resulting from the proposed new system. (She also has some points about the Mexico population and its birth rate.

She's right that, for laws to be implemented, the bureaucracy that gets handed the law has to be capable. ( The Farm Service Agency for most of its history for some of its programs was capable.) Give Bush his due, HHS and Mr. McClellan (I think it was) ended up doing a good job implementing the drug benefit program. They got lots of flak along the way, but having been in their shoes (not as big) I salute them.

I still haven't researched the legislation--understand it's 400 pages. My guess is that it may be too black and white, which can be a big problem, particularly if there's interdependencies. My own leaning would be to a loosely coupled system, openly acknowledged, that gets tighter as we go. (Sort of like Clinton with the welfare reform package he was handed--he signed on the basis he and Congress could tweak in later years, which they did.) So now we should acknowledge we aren't agreeing on an ultimate system, simply signaling a change of direction.

Bureaucrats Fear People

That's the truth. Here's someone who tells Federal bureaucrats not to fear dealing with their staffs:

Drawing on more than 30 years' experience in federal agencies from the General Services Administration to the Veterans Affairs Department, Liff encourages government bosses not to believe the prevailing wisdom that managing in the public sector is impossible. Federal managers too often are governed by fear, and Liff is out to help them conquer it.

"Fear becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy," Liff warns when discussing how managers can deal with problem employees like the staring bully. "If supervisors and managers understood that the system provides plenty of protections for management, as well as employees, they would begin to see things in a different light."

The problem I had as a manager was the Peter Principle. I was a very good bureaucrat, but as a human being I didn't like conflict. Unfortunately, management requires some conflict (despite the romantic manuals for managers which promote harmony). Of course this failing isn't limited to government managers, but it's a bit more prevalent because it's harder to evaluate performance of a government agency than a corporation.

Near Death Experiences

Marginal Revolution has had some interesting threads (here and here )on the effect a near death experience should have on a person. A reader rolled his car 4 times on a dry empty road and survived with no big injuries. Prof. Tabarrok has an interesting, if totally idiotic to me, take on the idea. His logic is logical, but he's never met a human being. But to each his or her own.

What does strike me is the fact no one has paused to give thanks to the bureaucrats who drew up and enforced the rules that make cars today much safer than they were in my youth. Time for all good bureaucrats to feel sorry for ourselves.

Unenforceable Laws--Speeding, Immigration, Prostitution

Shankar Vedantam, in his Monday Post column, cites the opinions of Douglas Husak and Lawrence Solum, who probably unknowingly follow in the footsteps of Robin Williams, my sociology professor 45 years ago:

Husak and Solum, legal theorists and philosophers, argue that laws on immigration are part of a broad pattern. In recent decades, they say, Congress has passed innumerable laws that no one seriously expects will be enforced. Such laws largely seem to serve symbolic purposes and are often designed to placate some powerful constituency -- conservatives in the case of immigration, or the entertainment industry in the case of laws that seek to deter people from swapping copyrighted music and movies.

Williams cited the case of prostitution, illegal in most states. Laws aren't effective in such cases--you get pro forma prosecutions, "show cases" for effect, not something that works. It's easy to take this line of thought too far. For example, I disagree with Husak and Solum about speed limits. They believe that, if cars on the Dulles toll road go 65 to 80 in a 55 mph zone, the limit ought to be raised. That's carrying the power of the majority too far--let me creep along at 60-65 in the right lane without feeling guilty about not going the speed limit.

It is a problem for bureaucrats whenever the gap between law and behavior becomes great. Do you enforce the rules or exercise the discretion and then become arbitrary?

A Question of Class

Recently (May 22, no longer available free) the NY Times was talking about the starting salaries for policemen on Long Island. They noted:

"Starting salary on the 2,692-member Suffolk force is $57,811 -- compared with $25,100 when entering the New York Police Department academy and $32,700 after six months at the department -- and rises after five years to $97,958 ($59,588 in New York). With overtime, many members of the Suffolk department routinely make more than $100,000."

As one might expect, the differential is causing NYC sergeants to become Suffolk patrolmen.

Then, on Saturday, comes a column on how college graduates should save money. The title is: "More Advice Graduates Don't Want to Hear". He wrote the same column last year:

"In droves, parents sent the column to their children. And some of those children wrote to me to vent. What I suggested was impractical, many said. How would you like to try to live on $40,000 a year in Washington or San Francisco, several asked."

In the bad old days (i.e., 1960), police departments were trying to upgrade their forces and get college grads. I'm not sure how well they've done, but the difference between the two pieces says to me there's a lot of unconscious arrogance among the college graduates who are coming to NYC to live. Makes my populist blood boil.

Is It Better to Know, or Not to Know

That is the question. I wrote the other day I'd rather know if I had the gene increasing the likelihood that I'll develop Alzheimers. (Not that I plan to spring for a DNA test anytime soon. I'm not that principled.)

Today the question is crime. Reston is included in the Backfence community site. One of their facilities is mapping the occurrence of local crime. So is it better to know, or not know? I suppose if you're mildly optimistic, so you overestimate the frequency of crime, having the facts would decrease your happiness. And vice versa the other way. Of course, the guy (Harvard professor type guy) who wrote "Stumbling on Happiness" might say in the long run it doesn't make much difference--you'll adjust either way. The only big deal would be if your belief is way off, in which case knowing the truth might change your actions (sell if crime is much worse than you thought; stay if it's much less).

But I think one point is that greater knowledge might tighten social connections, make the machinery of society have to operate with closer tolerances. I wonder.

A Bureaucrat's Tribute to a Bureaucrat

See this article about eagles and the bureaucrat, Rachel Carson.

Me and Nelson Mandela

Via Dr. Mankiw, this political questionnaire says I'm moderately left and slightly libertarian, like Nelson Mandela. I think my leftism is a little exaggerated; there wasn't any space between "Agree" and "Disagree" with a question. If they'd thrown in a "debatable" option, I would have turned out a wishy-washy flip-flopper.

Dr. Watson's DNA

On June 1 the Times reported that the complete genome for Dr. James Watson, one of the co-discoverers of DNA, was released to the public. There's many reasons to ponder this event, but the one that struck me is embodied here:

Amy McGuire, an assistant professor of medicine with Baylor's Center for Medical Ethics and Health Policy, said integrating human genomes into medical diagnoses raises various ethical questions. Those include what to do when they reveal personal information about a patient's relatives and whether someone's genetic code could result in discrimination from insurance companies or employers.

''I think we'll have a healthier and more compassionate world 50 years from now because of the technological advances we are celebrating today,'' Watson said.

While Watson said that he would review the map further, there was at least one part he would avoid. He planned to skip the section of the map that would tell him if he was at risk for Alzheimer's disease, which his grandmother died from.

My mother had Alzheimers. And I'm paranoid about having it. But I think I would want to know. After all, I already know my genome contains the genes for death.

But I'm not going to spend money to find out my mind might die sooner than my body.

House and Gawande, Both Better

My wife and I have one, and only one, favorite TV drama--House.
For those who have not seen it, it features an anti-social drug-addicted, crippled MD, who diagnoses difficult cases while fighting with the world.

My wife and I just read "Better" a collection of essays by Atul Gawande, a surgeon. The essays investigate the field of medicine, in very good prose.

What's the common thread here: I think much of the appeal of Dr. House is the theme of many of Gawande's essays, the constant drive to do things better. House is never satisfied unless he's figured out the answer; he cares much more about the answer than about his patients, which means there's a nice contrast between his misanthropy and his drive for answers, which often results in helping the patients. (Often, but not always; occasionally he has to kill someone to find the answer.) Gawande celebrates the doctors who always strive to improve their methods, to better their results. And he mourns the cases, as when the medical professionals fail to wash their hands, when imperfection leads to death, as in one of his cases.

And EWG Can Do It

I blogged a couple times about the USDA's payments database--it attributes farm program payments back to individuals (i.e., if the check is made out to a partnership, joint venture, corporation, the amount is split among the members of the partnership, joint venture, or stockholders). This is different from the data that the Environmental Working Group has been publishing for 10+ years in that it's more detailed. When USDA released it, they said it was too big to make available on-line. But an ag publication claimed to have done it and I tweaked my former co-workers at USDA about it. Now, EWG is promising to publish it by June 12.

Realism and Defeat

Does this statement by former Sens Dole and Daschle reflect the independence of mind resulting from being out of office or the poor judgment that may have caused them to lost their races?

Former Senate leaders Tom Daschle and Bob Dole suggested Wednesday that the nation's agricultural policy should be reformed, saying farmers should become more dependent on the marketplace.

Daschle, a Democrat from South Dakota, and Dole, a Republican from Kansas, proposed eliminating direct payments to farmers but retaining countercyclical payments, which pay farmers only when prices are low. They also suggested that farmers be encouraged to take part in emerging markets such as renewable fuels to help them stay afloat.

A Central Vision from the Brits

The British system of government is more centralized than ours, and more bureaucratic. Their professional civil service is much stronger and, from casual reading, their automation has been much more unified. (It appears that entire departments not only were using the same software system in the early 90's, but some systems were being shared across departments. Compare that with the problems USDA and other US departments have getting the same software to be used across agencies.)

In an apparent continuation of that theme, here's an excerpt from a newspaper:

Paul Wickens, General Manager of Steria in Northern Ireland said: “Records NI is one of the key components of a programme that is helping to realise the Northern Ireland government’s vision to create the ‘Office of the Future’. Its main aim is to set up a single storage location for all documents and records across all 11 departments which will save time, provide faster access to information and significantly reduce the amount of space currently required to store records and documents.

Unkept Promises and Laws

Via Agweb and John Phipps, Jim Wiesemeyer reports:

The lengthy time it took to get the disaster aid package completed is one of the reasons why House Ag Committee Chairman Collin Peterson (D-Minn.) wants a permanent disaster aid program as part of the new farm bill. But as with any new program under that debate, funding has to be found and that is becoming increasingly hard to obtain. Some budget offsets could be found via reduced direct payments, but some farm-state lawmakers are fighting that suggestion, including Senate Ag Committee Chairman Tom Harkin (D-Iowa).

Of course, Congress has repeatedly vowed, no more disaster aid. But "Congress" isn't a person so it can't make promises. Situations change, politicians change, and promises go out the window.

[Update: See this Omaha World-Herald article--disaster programs are in trouble when a paper in the heart of farm country is skeptical.]

Food Stamps II

A commenter (ed. "A"--"the one and only comment, for which you ought to be truly grateful.)* on the posts about living on food stamps challenges me to think further. Perhaps a Q and A format is appropriate:

1 Do I think it's possible to live reasonably healthily on food stamps? Yes, I do. It requires a lot of work and thought, and a good bit of knowledge, but it can be done. I'm less sure of the "organic" lifestyle--I agree with the commenter that the writer was a special case.

2 If my wife and I were told today to start living on $21 a week each, could we do it? Yes. We've the background and knowledge and the free time. Even more important, we've got a starting inventory of staples, like cooking oil, flour, beans, rice, and sugar. And most important of all, we live a quiet, steady life (knock on wood), one that's adapted to long range planning and stable habits. That's very different from the hand-to-mouth life of someone living day-to-day--you don't have the money to buy a 10 pound bag of rice, it's just one vicious cycle after another.

3 Are food stamps intended as the sole source of food dollars for their recipients? No. USDA's Economic research Service has an interesting article on the whole issue of food stamp spending here. (I was surprised by the spending patterns--I had the usual preconceptions.)

4 Which is larger, $21 a person per week or $326 per month for a family of four? Mathematically, they're about equal, but feeding four on the budget is not four times as hard as feeding one. Both workwise and moneywise, feeding four should be more efficient.

5 Do we have irrational expectations of food stamp recipients? Absolutely, read Jason De Parle or the book I just finished, "Off the Books" for some insights. (Plan to post on "Off the Books" separately.)

6 Is good food available in the inner city? That's an example of the sort of irrational picture in our mind we have--food stamp recipients and "inner city" are synonyms. It's just as difficult to get fruits and vegetables in a small town as in the big city, at least in the off season. Where I can walk to two big supermarkets, whole wards of DC and whole counties in rural America don't have one. (When I lived in DC, there were 3 small supermarkets (one Safeway in the basement of an office building around 11th and F, one about 1200 11th St, and one around 1800 P) I could use. I think they're all gone, although there is a Whole Foods in the area now that it's been gentrified. Small urban supermarkets don't carry large economy sizes, because people can't carry them, don't have the money to buy, and don't have the cars nor parking space to do pickups. We're talking close-in NW DC here, not Anacostia or east of Rock Creek Parkway.)

7 On the third hand, while we debate eating on $21 a week, much of the world lives on $1-2 a day.

* Adopting the habit of a few bloggers of splitting their personality in order to try to be funny.

Great Memorial Day Post

See this memory on Dwelling Place of Dragons: evokes childhood, the mystery and dread of the unknown, and recognition of the past.

I Was Right, Right, Right

Wrote a post earlier in the week about living on food stamps. Today an affirmation of my position--that it is possible to live on them--in the Post. The writer not only lives on $25 a week, but makes lunch for co-workers and lives organically.

Dieting and Food Stamps

There have been a number of articles about people, mostly politicians, trying to subsist on $21 a week, the amount allowed by the food stamp program. This article in the LA Times is one of the latest. It seems to me many of the articles are unrealistic in several ways:

• the first mistake is to say, you start the week with $21 and no food on hand and you end the week with $0 and no food on hand. A more realistic cost accounting would look at the cost of the amount of food consumed during the week. If you use a third of a bottle of cooking oil, then your budget is charged with a third of the cost.
  
• a second mistake is not buying in bulk
• a third mistake is buying processed, not ingredients.

Avoid those mistakes and I think it'd be possible to live on the food stamp allowance, reasonably healthily though not with all the fruits and vegetables now recommended. And certainly not enjoyably. Rather like living without TV; it's doable, but no one wants to.

Hats and Dust

Got the wash Post Sunday magazine today--it had an article on the building of the Pentagon, including a picture showing a bunch of workers building forms and pouring concrete. What was amazing was they are almost all wearing hats. I remember seeing photos of men going to baseball games, all in hats, but this is on the job.

Then Ms. Laskas in her column addressed the issue of dusting, as in: no one dusts any more.

Standards have gone to ??

Databases and Private Enterprise

Apparently private enterprise can do what FSA can't--put its database of farm program payments attributed to individuals on-line. Unfortunately, it requires a subscription, but see this link. From the article:

Echoing this perspective, Jaeger adds that historically, payment data has been published by lobbying organizations that have often presented the data in ways that support their agendas. “We know there are many who have well founded perspectives that differ from those propagated by these groups and our objective at Your Farm is to provide a venue for those views to be expressed,” he says.

The 1614 Database contains approximately 64 million records with information related to more than 2.3 million entities and individuals. The database provides information for $56 billion worth of benefits. Due to the size of the 1614 Database, FSA has indicated an inability to make the information available online.

“We like big ideas,” said Jaeger. “So we figured out how to put the information online. It’s about farmers. We believe they should have access to it.”

And the Rumors Started Flying in the South Building

This bit from the House Ag committee work on farm bill, via Brownfield:

As we've asked other committee members to withdraw their amendments 'til we get to the full committee, I would ask the gentleman to consider withdrawing it until next year," Holden urged Space. "And respectfully, the reason I say that to my friend is that, in consultation with the chairman of the full committee and with Mr. Lucas, next year we plan to have a reorganization of USDA."

Holden didn't say whether the USDA reorganization would focus specifically on the roles of FSA and NRCS in EQIP. But he suggested the reorganization would be much more sweeping.

"Again, after consulting with the chairman of the full committee, we believe any amendments that would come either in this subcommittee or in any subcommittee or in the full committee dealing with the transfer of responsibility or authority," Holden explained, "we'd like to wait 'til next year when we have a reorganization of the entire Department."

Those Despicable Bureaucrats

Shankar Vedantam in yesterday's Post has an article describing how we view others. Here's a quote:

Wesleyan University social psychologist Scott Plous said one dimension of the phenomenon is known as the actor-observer bias. When we do something wrong ourselves -- drive 60 mph in a 40-mph zone, for example -- we explain our actions in terms of situational factors. We say we are speeding because we are running late, or that we got held up at work. But when we see someone else do something wrong, we are far more likely to link the behavior to the nature of that individual.

It's described as the difference between "situational" understanding and "dispositional" understanding. I think it can apply to bureaucrats as well. When people cuss and moan about "faceless bureaucrats", I think it's true that they lack the bureaucrat's understanding of the rules being applied. So the bureaucrat knows the situation and applies the rules. The citizen, who just got screwed (or feels he did), only knows that some bastard screwed him by mindless application of some rules.

Welfare Farmers

The LA Times editorial page makes the linkage that many will make--between welfare (foodstamps) and farm programs.


But Jim Wiesemeyer has a nuts and bolts article on the actual crafting of the new farm bill that suggests opinion may swing towards a straight extension, which will disappoint many. (The logic is that "pay-go" rules mean new programs require new taxes or cuts in old programs, both of which may be too painful to pass. So simplicity is easy and an extension of 2002 may seem attractive.)

And All the Cars Are Shiny

I've another line to add to Garrison Keillor's lines about Lake Woebegon, but this one reflect modern times, not the egotism of the town. I was sitting in the parking lot waiting for my wife to finish grocery shopping (she picks up fruits and vegetables at the Hispanic supermarket after our regular Saturday lunch).
Ann Althouse has been on a recent kick of taking photos of cars, mainly classic cars, and that got me conscious of the cars in the lot. Compared to the vehicles in a similar lot when I was young (ed.--there were no Hispanic supermarkets within 125 miles of where you grew up) they looked newer and much shinier. Newer because I don't think exterior styling has changed as much since 1995 as it did between 1945 and 1960. Shinier because of improvements in paint.

Are US Bureaucrats Better Than Brits?

Far be it from me to say so. Comparing the farm programs in the two countries is comparing apples and elephants. And the British reorganized their bureaucracy and changed their payment system recently. But still, this article reporting that the British bureaucracy still hasn't made 22,000 payments for 2005 says something to me.

A Tale of Two Vanities

I bought my house over 30 years ago, new. More than 15 years ago I replaced the vanity in one bathroom.

While I hadn't done such work before, I had watched my father do all sorts of work on the farm, carpentry, plumbing repairs, concrete, painting, fixing farm implements. The Army in its infinite wisdom considered my test scores and disregarded my college background in American studies to decide that I would best serve the country as a generator repairman. (They then decided I could teach, as they started running both day and night classes, but soon realized my monotone was putting all my night students asleep so shipped me off to a warmer zone.) After buying my house, I decided to save by building some of my furniture, which I did and reasonably well. We still have a couple of chairs.

Finally, although I couldn't refer to the Internet for help, I could go to the Reader's Digest "How To..." series. So I assured my wife and my self that I could do this replacement. Unfortunately I didn't realize how interdependent plumbing systems are. If you decide to replace a 24" deep vanity with a 21" deep vanity (small bathroom), the drain pipe is no longer aligned with the sink drain.

No problem, I went off to the hardware store to find the proper parts. Unfortunately, I failed to measure before I went. And I never asked for help, not on my first visit to the store, not on my second visit to the store, not on the third visit to the store.

The more problems I ran into, the more frustrated I got and the more urgent it was for me to finish the job. So I threw things together, installed everything, spent a couple days trying to remedy a leak at the connection between the sink drain and the trap, and finally called it good enough for government work. And I regret the job every time I look at it.

Fast forward to yesterday, when my long-suffering wife decided she could put up with my replacing the vanity in another bathroom. After we bought the vanity and top, I went to the hardware store and asked for help. I got all the plumbing parts in about 10 minutes. And I'm doing lots of trial runs, dry fitting of the vanity and the plumbing together. I'm also taking breaks, as now, because I still get very frustrated (perhaps more than I used to) when I run into problems (like floors and walls not being perfectly plumb and square).

So I say with Ecclesiastes: Vanity, vanity, all is vanity.

Farewell Tony

Tony Blair officially announced the end of his prime ministership yesterday. I'm sorry to see him go.

I'm glad I wasn't writing a blog in 2002/3, because I wavered all over the lot on Iraq. Read the liberal hawks, like Kenneth Pollack, or the reluctant hawk Bill what's-his-face who's now editor of the NYTimes and I'd support Bush. Watch Bush or Cheney or Rice, and I'd start to remember Vietnam. I'd think, just because you were right (or so it seemed at the time) about Afghanistan doesn't mean that Iraq is a good idea. I'd think, what about Cap Weinberger (who set some famous criteria in the 1980's for using US troops), what about the Powell doctrine (which was a development of Weinberger's criteria) of using overwhelming force? How does that Republican doctrine fit with Wolfowitz's dismissal of Shinseki's warning?

But then I'd watch Blair, both in the US and in the C-Span coverage of Britain, and he was convincing. He didn't use Bush's simplistic, moralistic language of battling evil men. (Yes, I believe in evil, but analyzing one's enemies as simply evil is not the way to truth.) But he made a moral case, one that appeals to the moralistic liberal in me and that seemed more realistic about the effort needed.

What I failed to see was that Bush was in charge of implementation. Fatal error, fatal for many.

I'm not sure I mentioned reading the book "Long Way Gone" by Ishmael Beah, a former child soldier from Sierra Leone. Blair sent troops into Sierra Leone to stabilize the situation. That was an achievement, which one can appreciate from reading the book. (Though Blair isn't mentioned.)

The assessments of Blair in the papers haven't been particularly kind. They lean towards describing a glib politician who didn't achieve much and stuck too close to Bush. All that may be true, but I have to salute someone who got Paisley and Adams to the bargaining table in Northern Ireland.

Random Thought--Bonds and Sosa

I have the proper disdain for Barry Bonds and his effort to surpass Hank Aaron, whom I remember surpassing the unsurpassable (as it seemed in the 1950's) record of Babe Ruth. Steroids have no place in baseball.

Yet, and yet. Sammy Sosa is back playing and he and Barry are in the top ten homer hitters in their respective leagues. Now there seem to be two alternatives: either they're still on steroids, so the current testing routine is ineffective, or they're no longer on steroids, in which case their hitting exploits seem a bit more legitimate.

Why can't things get simpler as you get older.

Fruits, Vegetables, Blue Corn and True History

The May 8 Post has independent pieces with much the same point. Jeffrey Birnbaum outlines how the fruit and vegetable growers are hoping to get a bigger piece of money in the new farm bill. He says that they were long disdained as "specialty crops" but now are better organized and hope to have influence because they're strong in states often dubious of the farm programs (like CA and WA).

Meanwhile, over in Business a columnist for Bloomberg, Cindy Skrzycki takes up the cause of "blue corn" (usually used for tortillas), which hasn't met the definition of "corn" for the purpose of the farm programs. The lobbyist for the growers is testifying before Congress to get that changed:

He recounted the story of a Nebraska blue-corn farmer who went to his local USDA Commodity Credit Corp. office to apply for a low-interest, nine-month loan against his harvest. Clarkson said he was told he didn't qualify because he wasn't growing corn.

To oversimplify, the original farm programs were intended for field crops and dairy, commodities that could be stored (in the form of cheese and butter for dairy). They were intended to aid marketing by offering nonrecourse loans on stored commodities to keep them off the market until prices improved. They also had various measures to reduce production, to try to bring supply into line with balance.

Fruits, vegetables, and blue corn didn't fit into this picture. But by the 1990's things started to change. The supply management/production adjustment side of the programs was phased out (ending with the buyout of tobacco quotas this century). The phase out both complied with World Trade Organization rules on delinking subsidies and production and responded to the views of economists that allowing the market to give signals on what to produce, signals unclouded by subsidies, was the efficient way to go.

Meanwhile the provisions for loans on stored commodities were also changed. Loan deficiency payments and marketing assistance loans became ways of circumventing payment limitation and WTO rules [perhaps a biased view of mine]. Loans on actual stored commodities diminished in overall importance.

So by 2000 the picture is: crop farmers are getting money that's not closely tied to commodities. So blue corn, fruit and vegetable farmers say--if Uncle Sam is handing out money, why isn't he handing any my way?

In my view, while these farmers may have better lobbyists now, and connect with the zeitgeist better (natural foods, eating well, anti-obesity), their probable gains in the next farm bill also reflect the change in farm programs.

Fat Is Genetic

Yesterday I blogged on a possible relationship between welfare reform and obesity. Today the Times has an article by Gina Kolata reporting on research that shows a very high correlation between heredity and obesity. Two big studies, one on identical twins reared in different families, the other line of research is fat people who lost weight (and then regained it) and thin people who gained weight to become fat (and then lost it).

I can, reluctantly, accept the research. There's a long history of things about which people have theorized, often finding moral lessons in the theory. Unfortunately science normally blows the theories up, or at least severely complicates them, so I can't claim be good because my weight is about what it was when I graduated from college and therefore can't look down on people who differ from me by 100 pounds or so. Life often disappoints that way.

Welfare Reform and Fat Kids

One of the continuing marvels of life is the epidemic of obesity. It strikes me that welfare reform may have played a part in recent developments. The logic is, as more "welfare mothers" find jobs, the time and energy available to cook decreases and the temptation to buy ready-made and fast food rises.. See this Economic Research service pub for some background information.

David Brooks and 90 Percent

David Brooks had a poor column in the NY Times on Thursday. It's couched as advice to Wolfowitz and other Republicans, saying that 90 percent of any bureaucracy they come into are Dems, 90 percent of the media are Dems, etc. Lesson: although some will be partisan, most can be worked with, so work with them.

I quarrel with his figures, as well as the message. The percentage of Dems depends on the bureaucracy (DOD and VA are different than HHS and Education, also much larger). I'd guess that the military is mostly Reps (are they bureaucrats--yes, according to conservative scholar James Q. Wilson in "Bureaucracy".) DOD civilians are likely to be marginally Reps. So was Rumsfeld undermined by the Democratic military and DOD establishment? Obviously not.

For most bureaucracies and most bureaucrats in government, politics are much less important than daily living. The better comparison is to changing managers/coaches on an athletic team. Bush naming Wolfowitz to the World Bank is like Steinbrenner naming a good college baseball man to replace Joe Torre. The new guy has to step carefully.

Shakespeare in Odd Places

Just finished reading Ishmael Beah's book, "Long Way Gone", about his life in Sierra Leone, including as a child soldier. I recommend it. The material is grim but the narrative flows without self-pity or dramatics.

Last night my wife and I watched "Bollywood/Hollywood", a movie by Deepak Mehta featuring Lisa Ray. Mehta did "Water" with Ray, which got an Oscar nominee as best foreign film. Ray is stunningly beautiful, and not a bad actress. The movie is fun if you don't take it seriously. It would help if I knew more about Bollywood films because it has some in-jokes, but it's still a pleasant evening. Plot: rich son needs someone to pose as his intended wife to get mother and grandmother off his back until his pregnant sister gets safely married.

How do these relate to Shakespeare? Well, Beah as a child recites Shakespearean speeches for family and friends. He also gets into rap, hip-hop, and reggae and treasures his cassettes of rappers whose names I barely recognize. After becoming a soldier, his lieutenant spends his down time reading Julius Caesar. In the movie, grandmother uses Shakespearean snippets in egging on her grandson.

So a barefoot boy from Avon writes language that 400 years later is part of the culture of both Sierra Leone and India. And rap evolves in the Caribbean and US and travels back to Africa. The world is strange and wonderful