Good News Day

Seems the child mortality rate in the Third World has dropped dramatically since 1990. Plaudits to the Gateses and all others involved. Not mentioned, but this is a prerequisite to trimming the world's population--if you can be sure your child will live and provide for you, you'll have fewer children, eventually.

Good Government: Conflicts Versus Transparency

The Project on Government voices concern over an Obama appointee with a conflict of interest. Obama raised the standards for appointments, but has also waived the standards in a few cases. (I've not seen an analysis of the net effect compared to prior administrations.) I'm ambivalent on the subject; I highly value knowledge and conflict rules tend to work against that. So why not a compromise: the more spotless the appointees background, the less transparency in office, and vice versa. Appoint someone from the industry and they have to put an Internet videocam in their office.

I Need a Name for Bright Ideas That Aren't

It's not NIH (not invented here) but it's the same sort of ego-centric thinking. Maybe it's:
only I am brilliant enough to think of this idea = OIABETTOTI or my bright idea is best BIIB. I think there's a recurrent pattern among smart people of thinking no one ever before has had this great idea when the fact is someone probably has had a similar idea.

I'm picking on my favorite President, who wants to set up a farmers market for DC by closing Vermont Avenue on Thursdays.

But there are eighteen farmers markets in DC. Have the people in the White House thought about this? You need both supply and demand for a successful market. There's not many people living near the White House, so the demand is going to be mostly office workers picking something up for the evening. Doesn't strike me as the best prospect.

Our Varied Agriculture

Once again I'm reminded the pictures in my mind (as Walter Lippman once put it) don't match the reality of agriculture in the U.S. Nor, I'd guess, do the pictures in your mind.

Which county in the US has the most farms, do you think? Some place in Illinois or Iowa?

How about San Diego? At least that's their claim on their publication here. 6,687 farms. The median size is less than 5 acres. But their acreage of field crops has about doubled in the last 10 years.

It's a big country with lots of variety, which we all tend to forget in favor of simple positions.

Dogwood

My area of Reston is probably the most diverse and the poorest part. I remember a saleswoman warning me against buying the house I did by citing the mantra: location, location, location. There's an argument housing is a proxy for investment in children--parents choose the best schools by choosing the right school district, which would explain why redistricting gets very heated. Anyhow, the local elementary school has had its problems, despite lots of efforts to improve it, including going to a year-round calendar. Fairfax County is proud of its schools, but my school is the runt of the litter.

Not having kids, I don't follow No Child Left Behind that closely. It seems though from this article that NCLB can get very picky, with the fate of a school coming down to 3 students. I'm ambivalent about that--it's possible for unique circumstances to screw up any bureaucratic rule.

Why Animal Farmers Should Be Afraid

Here's a Treehugger followup to their post on how male chicks are killed. The summary of comments gives some time to those, like me, who argue this is the way you feed the world. But they put the key point at the end: the observation the original post attracted a hell of a lot more comments and interest than did other green issues. Our diet, and how animals are treated, are a very sensitive issue, so there will be lots more attention devoted to it in the future, which will not be good for current animal rearing practices.

What's Up in MA?

TPM has a commenter provide an update on the results of Gov. Patrick's health care reform in Massachusetts.

Noting the second point, maybe we solve the problem by expanding the number of green cards available to doctors and nurses from other countries. Or maybe we should do as the Amish do, send some of our people to Mexico for treatment.

Feeling Talented? Painting with Sand

Via Edge of the American West, the winning contestant in Ukraine's Got Talent. The article gives some context to the painting:

What she depicts is love and war, set amidst the turmoil of The Great Patriotic War, or as we call it in America, WWII. Ukraine was probably the area most devastated in the war, even more than Germany. It was a conflict that saw nearly one in four Ukrainians killed. A population of almost 42 million lost between 8 and 11 million people, depending on which estimate one references. Ukraine represented almost 20 percent of all the causalities suffered during WWII. And that was after Stalin had killed millions during the manufactured famines before the war. It to this day touches every Ukrainian. That's the context of war memory that Kseniya reaches out to.

It's an amazing 8 minutes. Even more amazing is to reflect how much humans bring to their sensations, as we the viewer are constructing the art from some sand on a projection table.

Next Task for Foodies

The foodies are currently driving to improve the menu in public schools, adding locally grown frutis and vegetables and doing away with junk food and the sort of thing bought just to help farmers (i.e., pork and cheese).

You'll know they've won that fight when they start on such efforts as:

• urging the Girl Scouts to sell apples, not cookies
• urging PTA's and sports teams to send their kids out going door to door selling brown rice, not chocolates.
  

Making Life Better for Our Animal Brothers

John Phipps blogs about a proposal to breed animals to reduce/eliminate their pain at being confined, as in CAFO's. Tyler Cowen blogs about researchers who have identified how to create music which tamarin monkeys like.

Once a Teacher, Always a Teacher (in France)?

Dirk Beauregard has an interesting interview with two teachers in France. They are language teachers, but I gather some of their responses apply to the profession generally. The picture is, it's hard to become a teacher but once you're in, you're in. No job switching in the French system.

Is Organic Farming the Wave of the Future? Maybe Not

Google Insights is one of Google's beta projects which tracks the change in the number of searches over time. Just for the heck of it I used it to search for "organic farming". I expected to see a steady rise, as it seems the subject is getting more and more attention. But, no--see this

The US isn't in the top countries and the interest seems to be declining gradually. Of course, one swallow does not a summer make. Maybe the Obama White House garden caused "organic garden" to show an increase? Here the trend line is flatter, and the US is in the top 3, but Obama doesn't seem to sparked enough interest to change the trend.

Angry Drunk Bureaucrat Strikes Again

In the third part of his guide to Pittsburgh for the G-20 conference, discussing shopping areas:

-The South Side - Shopping for young, hip urbanites
- Shadyside - Shopping for older, ironically hip urbanites
- Squirrel Hill - Shopping for Jewish, hip urbanites
- Downtown - Shopping for urbanites that need hip replacements

A good start to the long weekend.

Obama Can't Win

Two leading voices of the right have entirely opposite takes on our President:

Mr. Krauthammer in the Post this morning attacks him as Icarus whose wax wings have melted, an audacious flyer, all left wing, who is now going to have to operate as an ordinary politician. He says:

Obama unveiled his plans for a grand makeover of the American system, animating that vision by enacting measure after measure that greatly enlarged state power, government spending and national debt

Meanwhile, Mr. Brooks in the Times writes on health care reform, seeing Obama as a timid politician who wrongly promised everyone they wouldn't lose an existing health plan if they liked it, urging him to be bold:

This is not the time to get incremental. It’s the time to get fundamental. Reform the incentives. Make consumers accountable for spending. Make price information transparent. Reward health care, not health services. Do what you set out to do. Bring change.

A Health Care Concern

Ezra Klein in the chat linked to in my previous post responded to a question that's been worrying me. Generally speaking on health care I'd be for a European system. Lacking that, I'd support some of the proposals being floated, Wyden-Bennett if it were feasible. My biggest concerns are:

• the reliance on cleaning up "waste" to fund some of the proposals. Ronald Reagan made me suspicious of that idea long ago. Certainly I could see some big gains in efficiency if the entire system were as efficient as say Kaiser, or the Cleveland Clinic. But I'm too cynical to believe "waste". It's like what's-his-face's (Stockman--remembered a minute later) magic asterisk in Reagan's first budget.
• the focus on dollars doesn't pay enough attention to the health-care supply. Even if, by some miracle, we converted tomorrow to a single-payer system which cut administrative costs from 20 percent to 5 percent, we still have a problem. We need the doctors, nurses, labs, and clinics to provide the additional health care needed by the uncovered population (or by the covered population whose illness is not covered). Granted, as Ezra says, it will take time to implement changes and the uncovered people need, on average, less health care than the currently covered, I still have my doubts. Given that part of the financing is to be cutting reimbursements to providers, that's a signal to youngsters considering health care to go somewhere else. (Perhaps, given Obama's budget, to education or environmental occupations.)
  

Those are my concerns, but on balance I still favor what's being proposed.

An Honest Blogger

Ezra Klein in a Washpost forum:

"Betsy McCaughey is really just a horrible, evil, awful, lying person who wants to make the world worse for people because that's her ticket to increased TV time."

Come on Ezra. Don't hold back. Tell us what you really think.

Ezra Klein: I can't. This is a family paper.

Out-of-Network Fees

A good piece in MSNBC on out-of-network fees. Although I like Kaiser, we got caught by this. Amazing, since we don't travel much but when someone takes ill on a trip, it's hard to be rational.

The Funniest Sentence Today

From Angry Drunk Bureaucrat, part of his guide to Pittsburgh for the G-20:

The Carnegie Museum of Natural History is noted for its collection of old fossils, which make up the core of the local Democratic Committee.

Read the whole thing--he's in rare form.

White House Garden Video

Via Obamafoodorama, the White House has released a video on its garden. It's a puff piece, including a clip from the Victory Garden planted in 1943. Sam Kass observes that garden was over-hyped, as the reality turned out to be rather small, smaller than Michele's.

The video includes a time-lapse sequence of the garden, up through July. Kass claims it had produced over 200 pounds of vegetables by sometime in July. I'm not sure how impressive that is, but I give them credit for keeping it going. Many new gardeners give out by mid-summer.

I can't resist a couple snarks criticisms, though:

• Kass talks about amending the soil, apparently to adjust the N P K figures. What I don't see is the first and most important step in the organic gardening ideology: adding organic matter. If I recall, the USDA garden got some compost from Pennsylvania. But the White House garden's soil looks rather orange/red, not nice and dark brown, throughout the video. I'm not even clear whether they tilled the sod under, or removed it.
• someone kept the garden pretty well weed free. But it wasn't through the use of the second primary element of organic gardening: mulch. Mulch adds organic matter, and keeps down erosion when we have the strong rains often associated with our thunder storms. But it looks as if the WH just weeds and weeds. I hope that's Malia and Sasha doing the weeding--weeding is educational and character building. That's what my Calvinistic and Lutheran forebears would have said, but mostly it's just hard on the back, which is all the more reason young backs should pain, rather than the middle-aged guys from the Park Service who did the original tilling.
• back to organic matter. As I say, that's the key to organic gardening, and any good garden is only as good as its compost pile, at least that's what the organic nuts gardeners say. So where's the White House compost pile or bin? That should be front and center in this operation.
• where's the tomato count? The video doesn't go into August, so you can't tell how many plants they had, but tomatoes are the best argument for home gardens you can have.
• where's the fall plantings? By now they should be planting for fall, unless they're going to cheat again by buying seedlings.
• and the video could be better.
  

I have to think there's a lot of PR in this. And I can sympathize: Michele wouldn't be the first beginning gardener to have grand plans for all the work she and her girls are going to do, only to find out as the summer goes on that real life intervenes with other priorities. You have only to look at a handful of the plots in the community garden where my wife and I garden.

Cavalry in Poland

Margaret Soltan at University Diaries puts up a picture of her father-in-law, a cavalry officer in the Polish Army on the eve of WWII.

The picture can stand for many things, but it reminds me how long it takes to make changes. Yes, there were cavalry fights in WWI, but very few and none significant (unless you count camel cavalry and T.E. Lawrence). But here, 21 years later, a whole generation, a sovereign nation with brains and know how is still putting cavalry in the field. (As a side note, the Poles you remember were the ones who originally figured out the German Enigma machines, enabling Ultra to become a decisive factor in beating Hitler. ) Of course, the German Wehrmacht still moved by horsepower, but I don't think they had cavalry.

Prediction--Vera Lynn

I suspect there's enough old fogies like me to see her rise on the charts in the US. I'm too cheap to buy her records but YouTube is good.

Voluntary Production Adjustment

From the 1930 blog:

Editorial: The “buy-a-bale-of-cotton” movement now promoted in Georgia would be another failed attempt to artificially support a commodity by taking it off the market, as previously tried unsuccessfully with coffee, cotton, and wheat. The “success” of the earlier buy-a-bale movement in 1914 is mythical; cotton prices didn't peak until 1917 due to heavy wartime demand and short crops.

Worst Pun of the Day

From 1930 blog:

[Note: I believe Dept. of Fisheries later produced educational film with Dean Martin titled That's A Moray.] US Dept. of Agriculture has extensive department producing educational films, including T.B or not T.B., Insect Allies, That Brush Fire, and Persimmon Harvesting and Storage in China.

The EU Parliament and the Senate

From Farm Policy, a special Roger Waite piece on the next commissioner of Ag in the EU:

In that sense, it is worth recalling that the European Parliament is unlike almost any other Parliament in the world in that voting sometimes divides down Party lines (and there are now 6 big Party groups), but it also sometimes divides along national lines. [In my experience, farm policy initiatives tend to be voted along national lines.] Anyway, looking at past battles in the US Congress, we may now face additional divisions based on Committee loyalties, i.e. Ag Committee vs Budget or Environment or Development Aid Committee.

That's the way the Senate works on agriculture, although given the breadth of the farm bill it's sometimes obscured.

The Free Rider Problem in Agriculture

Back before I was born farmers experimented with voluntary cooperation in limiting production. Unfortunately it's hard to sustain because of the free rider problem. Here's another instance from the 1930 blog:

Minnesota Gov. T Christianson says doubts success of Farm Board campaign to reduce wheat acreage; approach should start at the smalller cooperative units and build up rather than working top down from national agency, and should be focused on substituting other crops such as flax for wheat. Requiring farmers to restrict output of all products would be strongly opposed as it “would permanently subordinate agriculture to industry,” since farmers wouldn't be able to produce a surplus to sell abroad as industry can.

How To Mislead With Statistics

From treehugger, a Lester Brown article on how to rethink food production for a world of eight billion:

"The shrinking backlog of unused agricultural technology and the associated loss of momentum in raising cropland productivity are found worldwide. Between 1950 and 1990, world grain yield per hectare climbed by 2.1 percent a year, ensuring rapid growth in the world grain harvest. From 1990 to 2008, however, it rose only 1.3 percent annually."

This sounds like disaster in the works. What Mr. Brown doesn't do is compare the rates of increase of population and food production on the same graph. Looking at a table of world population growth, we see that in 1962 and 1963, the rate of population increase was 2.19 percent. But those were the only years in which the rate was over 2.1 percent. So between 1950 and 1990 food production outstripped population. Now since 1990 the rate of population increase has declined steadily, reaching 1.25 in 2000 and 1.11 percent this year. So, once again, the rate of food production is higher than population.

Although this part of the piece is misleading, he has an interesting discussion of various techniques, especially doublecropping, which might be possible. And he doesn't hit the locavore/organic drum at all.

Now USDA Messes With the Definition of a "Month"

Not content with defining "beef" and "veal", the USDA decides there are 13 months:

"Please be advised that 2008 13th month data has been applied to the FAS U.S. Foreign Agricultural Trade Database "

(The Foreign Ag Service has redone their statistics database here and "13th month" is a term for a catchall of corrections and late reports.
[Updated with the link I intended]

Salute to Willie Cooper

Willie's been reappointed as state director of the Lousiana FSA office. He's been SED since 1972, showing he's been able to bridge the partisan divide in LA between Dems and Reps. (Mostly SED's get dumped with a new administration.)

The press release announcing it observes he has more than 50 years service in, meaning he's basically donating his time to public service. (He really does have more brains than that might indicate, lots more.)

Times Have Changed

Geezers become tiresome when they keep comparing the past and the present. I know that. But I can't resist. It's as bad when I used to smoke (2 packs+). (Why are we so proud of our vices?)

Anyhow, when I was young, the press would focus on a few metrics: cars, tons of steel, tons of coal, houses. Those were the measures of how well the economy was going and where the US stood compared to the Soviets.

So this figure surprised me:

Currently,85,000 people in the United States are employed by the wind industry; Slightly more than the 81,000 in the United States working as coal miners.

Maybe We Aren't Bigger in the Rear?

The 1930 blog reports this item:

Changes in women's dress styles have enabled Princeton to reduce width of stadium seats from 19 inches to 17.5, allowing 6,000 more seats in stadium.

Found this bit Googling:

The standard airline seat is 17.2" wide, while seat pitch ranges from 28" on some short-haul, down-and-dirty charters, to 33-34" on some planes.

The Technology Learning Curve

From the 1930 blog:

Actuarial Society of America survey reports death rate for passengers travelling on scheduled airlines is 1 in 5,000, or 200 times railroad death rate; safety increases by 63% after pilot has had 400 flight hours.

Obama's Books

Politico has a piece on how Obama's book selections have increased sales. I haven't read the Price or the Friedman (although I follow his NYT columns), have read the Haruf and the McCullough, and maybe the Pelecanos. I like Pelecanos, both because he's from DC and writes about it, and his hitch on The Wire, but I think this is his latest book. I'll get to it.

I like Haruf--one of the few serious fiction writers I've read in the last few years. And McCullough is maybe a little popular (as a failed historian I'm implied by the historians' creed to look down on any popular writer) but the man can tell a story.

So Much for the Sunshine

All good liberals and progressives think sunshine purifies government operations. That's why they push and push for transparent governance.

We fail to remember, that our founding fathers operated in the dark, using an "Agreement of Secrecy" to cloak their treason against the king.

Asymmetric Information on the Croft

Economists talk about "asymmetric information", where the two parties to a transaction have different information. The classic case was selling a used car--where the owner knows how good it is or isn't, but the buyer can't tell.

Musings from a STonehead, the small farmer/pig grower in Scotland, runs into a case of that. He knows his product, but his potential customers often don't know pigs from pokes. As he writes:

The typical customer wants a fantasy, a lifestyle statement, a “product” that says something about them, and they want it now because that’s the fantasy of the moment.

They have an image of themselves as a “modern urban farmer”, as a “saviour of rare breeds”, as someone capturing “the good life”, of being a “modern smallholder”, of joining the ranks of “celebrity pig keepers”, showing their “anti-supermarket” credentials, and so on.

Certainly, we do have people that come to us with a genuine, practical, reality based desire to fatten a couple of pigs but they are in the minority.

But I also know from talking to the wide array of people that come to us, that the real motivation for buying pigs is to “live the dream”, just as it is for buying any other consumer item.

USDA Blog Process Needs Work

Today, I believe, is August 26. Today the USDA blog posted this. Vilsack proclaimed the community garden week August 6.

(I'd suspect this is a symptom of the fact the blog isn't integrated into the USDA institution yet. It takes a while to make such changes.)

Clayton on Musical Chairs: Lincoln as Ag Chair

Chris Clayton argues that Kennedy's death will move Harkin to chair the Health, Education, Labor committee, and Senator Lincoln to chair Agriculture.

Don't know enough to argue, but to observe this is our democracy's version of: "the king is dead, long live the king."

Why NAIS Might Seem Sensible

Today DC and MD students went back to school. Prince George's county has a trial going on--students have cards to be swiped when they board the school bus, which enables the system to track them. The broadcast reports don't say whether they also swipe the cards during the day, but I'd assume they do.

When we track our children and our pets, why not track our food?

The Voice of the Market Is Slow, Tech-Wise

I was curious about the Wall Street Journals archive, so I surfed around their site. They've not updated the browsers supported from IE 7.0 and Firefox 2.5.

FSA and ARRA--Update 1

I blogged last week about FSA's failure to update its Recovery Act (ARRA) data on the MIDAS program. I sent a message for the Administrator through the FSA site.

Well, I've not received a final answer to the message, just a boilerplate interim message. And the MIDAS report still has a 4/28/2009 date on it. But the overview ARRA page has been updated.

Do Students Still Applaud Their Professors?

I have a memory from my college days of a handful of times when, at the conclusion of a lecture, the students broke into applause. As that was 50 years or so in the dim dark past, this may be totally inaccurate. But I think it was a combination of the structure of the lecture, coming to a climax of the argument right at the 50 minute mark; the knowledge which was evident during the course of the lecture; and the clarity, passion and enthusiasm of the delivery. I might be conflating applause for the final lecture with applause for lectures during the year, but I'm comfortable David Brion Davis (American intellectual history) and Walter LaFeber (history of foreign policy) both got applause at times.

I wonder if students still do that, or are they too blase, too wrapped up in their laptops?

I suspect maybe Brad DeLong might get applauded occasionally. If not, I hereby applaud his philosophy, as stated here, despite the obvious error in his first sentence:

This is the University of California at Berkeley, the finest public university in the world. You are all upper-middle class or upper class--if not in the size of your parents' houses in your options and expections--and thus much richer than the average taxpayer of California. Yet, even at today's reduced funding levels, the taxpayers of California are spending $10,000 a year subsidizing your education. Why are they doing this? Because they believe that if your brains get crammed full of knowledge and skills than many of you will do great things that will redound to the benefit of the state, the country, and the world. Therefore it is my business to cram your brains full of knowledge and skills. It is then your business to go out and try to do great things--and if those great things happen to involve a lot of money, remember the investment that the poorer-than-you taxpayers of California made in your education, and pass some of the resources you will earn on to your successors here at Berkeley. If I am happy in December with how the course has gone, the median grade will be a low B+. If I am mezza-mezza, the median grade will be a low B. If I am unhappy, the median grade will be a B-. If people don't do the work I assign--or if I were to assign less work--I assure you I will not be happy come December.

Five "Myths" of Healthcare

T.R. Reid, whose book on living as a journalist in Japan I recommend, has a new book coming, which he publicizes by doing an opinion piece in the Post, his former employer. His five myths:


1. It's all socialized medicine out there.
2. Overseas, care is rationed through limited choices or long lines.
3. Foreign health-care systems are inefficient, bloated bureaucracies.
4. Cost controls stifle innovation
5. Health insurance has to be cruel.

He claims to have researched Canada and many of the EU countries.

Reading the Bils

Slate has a post discussing the size of various pieces of legislation, why some are so large, and who actually reads the stuff. It's pretty good. Though I'd add the following as my two cents:

• the 2008 farm bill was 673 pages, I think (based on a quick Google).
• you need to distinguish between legislation starting from scratch and legislation amending existing laws.
  
• The first is conceivably something a layman, a high schooler, or even a Congress person could understand. The reason is if you're outlining a brand new program (like maybe Cash for Clunkers), you have to define your terms and specify the processes. Hopefully the definitions don't rely much on pre-existing law. (For example, if Cash for Clunkers was available in "the United States", did that mean just the 50 states, Puerto Rico, American Samoa, etc.?
• But when the legislation changes and modifies existing law, it's very difficult for even experts to understand. The reason is lawyers write it, and they somehow think it makes more sense to specify minute changes than to provide text that's understandable. I don't know why, except that's the way they've done it. Perhaps it's because they want to minimize the number of words used, perhaps because it takes so much time and money to set the text of laws in hot lead.
  

Clunkers

Somewhere, I think in the printed version of the Post this morning, I read that a significant number of the clunkers destroyed under the cash for clunkers program were old vehicles being driven by teenagers. Of course one can't assume they're now driving the new cars bought under the program; they may be driving the car the parent who is driving the new car used to drive. But either way they're significantly safer now, what with air bags front and side, etc. I don't know if we've saved 1 life, 10 lives or 100 lives, but it's a good thing.

I Don't Understand Quantum Physics and Farming

When I grew up, the planetary model of the atom was standard. Sets of electrons revolving around a nucleus of neutrons and protons, that was it. I've always been interested in science, so I've read enough to recognize some of the terminology of quantum physics. Unfortunately, as I age my capacity to absorb this stuff seems to have shrunk. I consoled myself by thinking quantum physics had little connection with my life. But this piece (actually not the original one I saw, which I think was in Scientific American, or maybe online--my memory for my reading is shrinking as well) on how quantum physics works with chlorophyll to capture energy really upsets my consolation.

Thought for the Day

Via Marginal Revolution, Hal Varian (a Google man) on management and IT:

"Back in the early days of the Web, every document had at the bottom, “Copyright 1997. Do not redistribute.” Now every document has at the bottom, “Copyright 2008. Click here to send to your friends.” So there’s already been a big revolution in how we view intellectual property."

True enough, but it's still working its way through society.

Brad DeLong Is a Conservative Old Fogey

He may be a mostly liberal economist, but when it comes to matters of academic teaching he's a stick-in-the-mud. He believes students should study on their own. Apparently his university is giving students what, back in the day when I was in high school we called a study hall period.

See his post.

Texas Is Worthless

I love writing those words.

The basis for the assertion is a paper from farmgate, where some ag economists tried to assess what farmland would be worth if there were no farm programs. They came to the conclusion Texas cropland was worth $0. Or, actually, they said 100 percent of the value of Texas cropland was due to farm programs. Economists have long said the value of farm programs was capitalized into the value of cropland. It makes sense--an owner can get higher rent for land with bases, and therefore higher sales prices too.

There's some modifications and qualifications, as you'd expect with any scholarly paper from economists, but I like my first impression: Texas is worthless.

Clayton on NAIS

From Chris Clayton's column a few days ago:

if anyone wonders why animal ID is so screwed up, it's partially because USDA gets no definitive direction from Congress on just what should happen with the program. Some members in the House and Senate want a national, mandatory program. Others say no way. So now, USDA gets potentially half the money to keep the program on some sort of life support.

That's the way legislation works. If Congress comes to agreement, fine. If Congress fudges, and papers over disagreements in order to get a piece of legisltion, the poor bureaucrat suffers.

Health Care Factoids

From extension.org:

Right now, the government pays about half of the health care bill, insurance pays roughly a third, and around 10 percent is paid directly by patients either through things like deductibles and copays or simply when you go to a doctor, you hand over a check or cash.

Via several sources, but originally spurred on by a statement in Understanding America, private insurance covers about 15 percent of the British population.

It says to me the easy rhetoric about a proposed government takeover of health care is much too simplistic.

Agriculture Used To Be Important

From the 1930 blog:

Decline in steel production blamed on drought; with extent of crop damage still uncertain, industries dependent on farm purchasing [emphasis added] are curtailing steel buying. These include low cost autos, farm machinery, can companies. Structural steel remains strong. Some price declines seen in steel and iron products; steel down to lowest price since 1922.

Synthetic nitrate producers reach agreement; German industry expects it's first step to forming cartel to bring production in line with consumption, but initial agreement considered unsatisfactory due to short duration and lack of commitments to reduce production.

The first bit shows the importance of farming back in the 1930's. And steel was one of the basic industries then (coal and autos being others).

The second supports my doubts over Prof. Pollan's (and others) narrative of the adoption of nitrogen fertilizer (post WWII war surplus nitrates from explosives).