Bureaucrats Day: Civil Service

The Pendleton Act was signed Jan. 16, 1883. The purpose was to regulate and improve the civil service of the United States, partly by establishing the Civil Service Commission. The first use of the term "civil service" was in 1770 according to Merriam-Webster. "Military service" was first used around 1630.

When Headline Writers Get It Wrong

As in the headline for this Freakonomics post: "When Technology Isn't the Answer".  The post cites a doctor who wrote a Time article describing problems with health care software.  As the commenters make clear, the problem is poor system design and the learning curve for health care software.  It's rather like a headline in 1900 saying: "Why the Automobile Isn't the Answer".

A Problem of Terminology: Hollow "Agencies"

I think this is true: discussion of improving management in government, particularly IT, stumbles on a simple fact of terminology--much of the literature uses "agency" to mean "department" (because they also want to include the independent agencies, and "department-level" or similar wording seems too awkward).  See this discussion of IT management.  The problem is that it leads to the easy assumption that the "agency" is a cohesive unit, where the agency head and her CIO can control the operations of the agency's components.

For USDA, and I suspect at other government departments, the idea of the "agency" as being cohesive and under the direction of the Secretary and his CIO is laughable. Even after the reorganization of the department in the Clinton Administration, there's a bunch of agencies which do not snap to when the Secretary yells: "attention". Just ask ex-Secretary Glickman about his efforts to do some integration of NRCS and FSA.

Damn, I Was Good

Two senators suggest a change in computer security, as a result of Wikileaks:

The senators urged a transition to a "role-based" system to access secure information. "Instead of making all information available to everyone who has access to classified systems, a role-based system makes information available based on individuals' positions and the topics for which they are responsible." In this system, they explain, an embassy's diplomatic cables would be available only to military officials deployed in that country or who work on related issues -- not to everyone with a security clearance at the Defense Department.

 My self-congratulation relates to a proposal in the mid-90's, suggesting what we needed for Info-share was security based on roles.  Unfortunately, that idea, as well as others, never took root in the bureaucratic soil. There's something in the Bible about seed falling on rocky ground and it's the same way for ideas.  You need the soil, the tiller of the soil, and the idea to come together. Else all you have is might-have-beens, close relatives of woulda, coulda, shoulda.

Parenting--Tiger Moms and Pushy Families

The "tiger mom", the Yale law prof who talks about pushing her two daughters to perfection by behaving as a "Chinese mother" is getting lots of attention.  I'm also reading Condolezza Rice's memoir, which describes how her parents pushed her and pushed her (it's interesting, not great, but interesting).  This ties into a Tyler Cowen post on a study which indicates that environment makes the most difference for people in less fortunate conditions while genes make more difference in the more fortunate conditions.  (Think of this example: if food is scarce, you don't get many tall basketball players; if food becomes plentiful, genes for height can be fully expressed.  Stole that from a book I read which I'm too lazy to look up.)

Over my lifetime parents have invested more and more effort into rearing their children and giving them advantages.  I think that's a reflection of the good times we enjoy.  In the 19th century, a good parent was a good provider or a good homemaker.  Do those things well and the environment would take care of your kids.  Now with most Americans middle class or better, the competition is stiffer.  But because less is under the parents' control, there's more premium on the margins.  It's rather like athletes in track.  When I was growing up, the times for the mile were being lowered slowly.  Then came Bannister and Landy and the breaking of the 4-minute barrier and then fell quickly.  Now it takes more and more effort and training to eke out any world record in either the mile or 1500.

Some Statistics on Threats

I posted yesterday wishing that the Obama administration would post statistics on threats.  Today the Post has a piece on threats to Social Security Administration's personnel. The number of threats has gone from 897 in 2007 FY to 2,336 in 2010FY. The administrative judges, who deliver decisions on eligibility, such as eligibility for disability benefits, feel especially insecure.


This Politico article reports on statistics of threats to Congresspeople, while this was yesterday's Post piece.

Seems to me there's a valid argument possible that political rhetoric and mudracking media stir antagonism to the establishment, which should show up pretty directly in the threat and assault statistics.  Of course, the big question is what other factors could be involved?  For example, in the case of SSA, people who are out of work due to the Great Bush Recession could be expressing, not political anger, but economic frustration.  That's why we need a long term project to gather and display such statistics.

A Funny Sentence

At least for those who remember when John Cage was a controversial composer.  From Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution, discussing an analysis of what men find attractive in women:

. Instead, it just so happens, that the thing that some people love is the very thing that repels others. We see the same phenomena in art, some people love John Cage, other people would rather listen to nothing at all. ;)

Saddest Funniest Sentence of the Day

From an Ezra Klein discussion of suggested ways for Congresspeople to be more secure in their meetings with the public: [I've bolded the sentence.]

But will congressional aides make for good bodyguards, even if they get "a bit of training?" I doubt it. Because field organizers actually don't know how to find the one nut who will pull a gun every few decades, they'll start throwing out lots of people who seem a little off. Better than safe than shot at. But if you've ever been to a community meeting, "seems a little off" pretty much describes the whole room. And people who "seem a little off" should have access to their member of Congress, too.

I might add I like Klein's posts on the Arizona shootings.

Blast from the Past: "Labor in Vain Road"

In Ipswich, MA.  (Google for it.) Ipswich takes pride in its 17th century houses, the most of any site on the east coast.

Open Government and Political Violence

Lots of discussion in the wake of the Arizona shooting. What I've not seen is a whole lot of facts about political violence.  The closest I've seen is an assertion that threats against the President have increased since Obama assumed office.  Maybe the Obama administration should apply a little open government: put a running total of threats and assaults against the President, justices, Congresspeople, and federal employees on its data.gov.  It'd take a while to build up a baseline, but it'd give a reasonable basis for some discussions.

Budgetary Incoherence on the Right

Reihan Salam at The Agenda comments on a piece elsewhere:

." But I did appreciate the opening section on how to rethink support for farmers:

Canada has experimented with a program that provides government matching funds for farmers' deposits into savings accounts that help them buffer their incomes against the ups and downs of farm prices. Such a program in the U.S. could achieve the objective of helping family farmers survive while enabling policy makers to withdraw billions of subsidies to big agriculture.
These changes, plus closing the U.S. Agriculture Department's Foreign Agricultural Service, would save about $19.5 billion. Not a bad start."

This seems incoherent to me.  The farm programs these days aren't the $19 billion people were using in the early 2000's, but more like $12 billion. And if you're matching farmers' deposits (like a 401 K setup), you can't claim to cut all that money.  And the FAS is not a high dollar service.  (Probably around $200 million.) Maybe they got confused between FSA and FAS?  As I say: incoherence on the right.  (Not that the left is always right when they're discussing agriculture.)

Was Al Gore Wrong in Reinventing Government?

One of the theories of the 1990's was "flatter is better".  Reduce the number of supervisors and creativity will blossom and efficiency with flourish and good things will result.  Al Gore adopted that theory as part of his "Reinventing Government" (it may have been part of "business process reengineering" as well, but I'm too lazy to check).  So agencies were supposed to reorganize to cut management layers.  My understanding of FSA's efforts was that it was mostly a paper exercise; first-level supervisors lost their personnel responsibilities but retained their day-to-day operational responsibilities; units formerly called "sections" became "work groups", branches became "sections", etc. 

Of course, over the past 15 years, that particular reform may have gone by the wayside.  Certainly the proliferation of titles at the upper levels of FSA and USDA seems to have continued.

Anyhow, Steven Kelman was involved with Gore, mostly on procurement reform as I remember.  But now he's got a post in Federal Computer Week in which he seems to say Gore may have been wrong: "There was a period, especially in the 1990s, when the conventional wisdom was that first-line supervisors accomplished little. By contrast, Gittell’s finding is that those supervisors help broker communication across group boundaries."

The Melting Pot and Tossed Salad

When I was young, the "melting pot" was the dominant metaphor for America vis a vis immigration.  Of course, that was during the period between 1923 or so and 1965 when immigration was basically restricted to Western Europe.  (Mexicans were "wetbacks" or migrant workers, not immigrants we recognized.)  The idea I took away was like melting your crayons all together, which I'd done once or twice. 

In college a young government professor named Theodore Lowi, who later became prominent in the political science field, suggested maybe the better metaphor was "tossed salad".  Rather than the different nationalitiies all melting together and forming a new American nationality, each one would maintain some of their identity.  That would logically lead to the "diversity" argument; the theory that America prospers by recognizing and maintaining differences.

The above is just background.  In recent years I've grown interested in genealogy.  Some of my paternal ancestors came to America in the 1720's or so; others came in the 1820's.  What seems to be the case is they were almost entirely Scots-Irish, Covenanters. The exception is a Quaker lineage.  And, through geographic  concentration and cultural networks (the Presbyterian church), my ancestors seem to have kept together, marrying within the general Scots-Irish community, for about 200 years of life in America. Even in my father's generation his brother continued the pattern.

Because my mother's ancestors were Germans emigrating in the last half of the 19th century the picture is not as distinct, but my maternal grandparents married within the German community.

So, at least based on my limited sample, it's true enough the "melting pot" metaphor is misleading.  Yes, we eventually melt together but it takes a long time.  And even the melting of Scots-Irish and German is not the merging of polar opposites.  Lutherans and Calvinists have different theologies, but they aren't polar opposites.

Interesting Paragraph--People and Institutions

A post on Roving Bandit, who's involved somehow (I forget how and am too lazy to check) with NGO's and development in east Africa:

We know the secret of development. It is good institutions. We have a reasonable idea what good institutions entail. The only problem is that we have very little idea about how good institutions are established in societies that currently have bad ones.

The bandit goes on to argue the simplest remedy is to have the inhabitants of societies with "bad institutions" emigrate to societies with "good" ones. It'd be easier to take 1 million Afghans from Asia and integrate them into the EU, Canada, and the US than it would be to develop good institutions for them in Afghanistan.

The argument appeals to me, but I'm not sure why.  I see a lot of cultural things persist and persist in our society and yet there's lots and lots of change between the original culture of immigrants and the culture they adopt in the U.S>

Violence in the Past

Am reading Edmund Morris' "Colonel Roosevelt", the last of his trilogy on the life of the second greatest Republican President. (His first volume led to his writing the controversial biography of Reagan, "Dutch".) It's a Christmas present, which I'm enjoying.  TR was a man of many parts.  Morris does a good job on him.

Friday I finished the section on TR's run for President in 1912 on the ticket of the Progressive Party, against Wilson, Taft, and Debs.  As Morris observes, he was still the youngest of the four. John Schrank tried to assassinate him just before a campaign speech. Luckily, the bullet was slowed by passing through 100 pages of speech (the 50 page text was folded in half) and off his eyeglass case before entering his body.  TR knows it didn't enter the lung, so he carries on, speaking for 90 minutes before going to the hospital for treatment.  Quite a character, notably described as wanting to be the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral.

Seems to me  the common threads in our history of assassinations and attempted assassinations (Jackson, Lincoln,Garfield, McKinley,TR, FDR, Truman, JFK, MLK, RFK, [Updated--Wallace ], Ford, Reagan, Clinton, Giffords are:

• lack of rationality as compared to the attempted terrorist acts. Only Lincoln and Truman were a group effort and only those cases were "rational" in some sense. The loners like Hinckley, Ray, Oswald, and Schrank all were operating in another world.
• the targets were all foci of great emotion, a lot of it negative. Even President Ford was not only president but controversial after his pardon of Nixon. 

So to me the bottom line is: crazy loners don't kill nobodies.

The Decline of the WASP Establishment

Charles Blow has a piece on religion and representation in Congress in the Times today. I'm mainly interested in the graphic accompanying the piece showing changes in representation from 1961-2 to now. Catholic, "Other Protestant" and Jewish have all risen (maybe 50 percent or more based on eyeballing), while Episcopal, Methodist, Presbyterian, and Congregationalist have all fallen at roughly the same rate.  Baptists and Lutherans remained relatively steady. In other words, the 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 6th ranking denominations in 1961 fell drastically.

I'm Scientifically Illiterate

This Extension post says college students lack scientific literacy. When I dig into it, I discover I don't answer a key question on the carbon cycle correctly: From whence do plants obtain their mass? 

The answer seems to be from the carbon dioxide in the air.  (Although I'd suspect many plants obtain much of their mass from the water in the ground, being constituted mostly of water, but the question, and my initial answer, ignores the issue of water.)

French Bureaucrats

Dirk Beauregarde posts on a hard-working French bureaucrat; she worked so hard she wrote a book at work about how hard she was (not) working:

'This is a world where everyone justifies his or her existance with an official paper, a rubber stamp and where bosses, to justify their positions, hold runds of endless meetings – if you want to feel important or be seen to be working, hold a meeting and then get your underlings to write a report on it in time for the next meeting. It’s a world I know well, but I woldn’t totally agree with Ms Boullet’s analysis. For all those people who are doing nothing, there are just as mant running around like headless chickens trying to meet impossible deadlines. [I like Dirk's eye for society, but he does nothing to uphold the high standards of spelling incorporated in the Bloggers' Code.]"

The Pervasiveness of Social Norms

At Barking Up the Wrong Tree, a post on a study showing that blind people "see" race.

The Interactive Constitution

Via Ezra Klein, here's a section by section presentation of the Constitution, with an accompanying exegesis, all done interactively.

The Nosy Book

First heard the term "nosy book" in a chat last week.  Seems to be a name for a local directory, including names, addresses, phone numbers, and occupations, athough there's not many Google hits for it.  In the old days privacy wasn't primary.

My Metrics

For Jan.4 2010 to Jan. 4, 2011:

Visits   5,603 (down  about 35 percent) from 4025 visitors and 7690 page views in the prior year.
Average time on site just under a minute and 70 percent new visitors

It's odd that Belize shows up in the countries list, and Australia had a longer time on site than other countries.

Keywords include "what do bureaucrats do", "John Berge", "faceless bureaucrat", "mere surmise, sir", "USDA" and "MIDAS".



It looks as if I'm more boring the older I get (I may have lots of company in that). To the extent people are interested, it's more in USDA/FSA bureaucracy and organic/food movement stuff than anything else. Maybe I need to look to Facebook and Twitter?

Ruin in Detroit

Via Marginal Revolution, a photo slideshow on the ruins in Detroit. What's most distressing is the library. 

Ezra Klein Is Impressed by Boehner

See here. Reactions against type such as this make me value both the commenter and the commentee more highly.

How To Cut Crime

Dirk Beauregarde on Beyonce and how to cut crime, at least the crime of burning cars, which is an old French tradition at New Years.

Implications of a Government Shutdown

Charles Peters in the Washington Monthly used to have fun with bureaucratic techniques to avoid budget cuts.  I think he called one tactic: "closing the Washington Monument".  In other words, try to cut an agency's budget and the wise bureaucrat will make sure the cut shows up in the most painful way possible. That's sort of what will happen if history repeats itself and the government is shutdown.  If I remember the Gingrich days, there very quickly was some triage.  Congress decided that things like defense had to continue (and we weren't involved in one war in Afghanistan then and one (something) in Iraq).  And Social Security checks had to go out.  And other critical activities had to happen.

One little-realized fact is that some agencies, or some activities within some agencies, are not financed by the budget and appropriations, but by user fees. So presumably passports will continue to be issued and meat inspections will continue. 

But I'm probably confusing two issues: a possible Republican refusal to increase the debt ceiling; and a refusal to fund the government by passing a continuing resolution or appropriations bills.  If I recall, Secretary Rubin used some financial manipulation to get around the first for a while, like raiding various trust funds by putting Treasury IOU's in place of the fund assets.  The Republicans howled, but the tactic worked.  There's a limit to how long that can go on.  The second issue causes parts of the government to shut down.  Because the Democrats didn't pass any 2011 appropriations bills, if and when the current continuing resolution expires the whole government would shut down.  That's when you'll see some bipartisan agreement on funding things like DOD, VA, IRS, SSA with appropriations.  What happens next we don't know.

Sen, Grassley Has a Failing Memory

Chris Clayton at DTN posts on Sen. Grassley's views, which are that direct payments may be challenged.  He includes this quote:

"I think the principle behind direct payments when it was established in '96 was sound, but I think now reflecting upon two or three years where there hasn't been any loan programs, target payments, very little counter-cyclical payments made, that it stands out as just a hand out to farmers as opposed to a safety-net approach that was the motive behind direct payments."

My memory is that Freedom to Farm was intended to transition farmers to a free market economy, with the payments used as a bridge to the future, not as a safety-net.  From a NYTimes summary on Pat Roberts:

Roberts fashioned a Freedom to Farm bill designed to phase out subsidies over seven years. In September 1995 his bill failed in committee when Southern Republicans voted against it. But in November 1995, Roberts persuaded Agriculture conferees to include most of his bill in the 1996 budget reconciliation bill, which Bill Clinton vetoed.

Blogging Metrics

I want to compliment GovBookTalk.gpo.gov for its post providing its metrics for the year. I've commented in some places, and possibly posted here, about my belief government websites should have a page devoted to their metrics, just so citizens, management, and the website creators could all see what's happening.  GovBookTalk is the first .gov site I've seen which has published any metrics.  Of course, now I've complimented them, I need to eat my own medicine and publish my own metrics...

Huckleberry Finn

Kevin Drum posts  on a plan to publish a version of Huckleberry Finn with "nigger" replaced by "slave". He goes with a lesser of two evils: better to have the book taught in high school even bowdlerized than restricted to college.  I disagree.

[Updated: interesting comment thread  at Ta-Nehisi Coates on this issue. University Diaries also has a post.]

Scholarly Citations and Page Numbers in Kindle

Matt Yglesias endorses a complaint by John Holbo: Kindle doesn't show page number so it complicates the job of creating footnotes for scholarly articles.  Seems to me there's a simple cure: adopt a standard which adheres to the following format: [version of publications--Kindle, Google Book, etc.][search by Google, Kindle, whatever][date searched][number of result].

The point is, after all, not to specify the page number, but to allow someone coming after the writer to reproduce the writer's results, just as a scientific experiment needs to be specified in enough detail to allow reproduction. So if you specify a search engine and a text, and the terms you used to reach the material, that should be quite adequate.

Why China Is More Powerful Than the US

Short answer: it's not, I'm just polluting the Internet with more disinformation.  Dan Drezner debunks the myth in Foreign Policy.

Lord Acton Was Right

Barking Up the Wrong Tree has a post, on a study which asked whether power makes us dehumanize people. The answer is "yes". Whether it's childhood bullying, or soldiers and civilians, the wealthy and the poor, whenever there's an imbalance of power it's going to be abused.  Not always, but enough of the time any moral person should be concerned and work to change the situation.

[Updated: On second thought, that might be my definition of the difference between conservatism and liberalism: liberalism thinks governmental action can be rational and improve balances of power; conservatism thinks government action will mostly make things worse.]

An Interesting Life

A local heiress died at 70, and her obit in the Post was one of the more interesting I've ever read.  For one thing, in reference to her second husband:

"About the kindest things that witnesses could say of Carmichael were that he was a pretentious, scheming, self-infatuated, manipulative dilettante."

Those Overpaid Federal Bureaucrats

This Post article discussing the possibility of some airports switching from TSA to private contractors to do security checks. Interestingly, there's no clear conclusion on whether private contractors would be cheaper.

At the other end of the spectrum, the Post had an article on high-level government employees leaving the Obama administration for private employment which might use their knowledge and contacts.  They anticipate a doubling of their salaries.

The Halcyon Days of Nonpartisan Policy Making

Back when Prof. Kahn of Cornell was pushing deregulation:

” He also enjoyed a convergence of interests including conservatives (he credited the Ford administration with paving the way for his efforts), liberals (particularly Senator Ted Kennedy, whose 1975 hearings highlighted the perverse effects of airline deregulation and supported increased competition), consumer groups and activists (notably Ralph Nader), and academics.

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2011/01/02/alfred-kahn-was-a-true-american-hero/#ixzz1A0DVBW1h

The Fallacy of X Is a Minuscule Percentage of the Budget

I'm starting to see preemptive arguments from interests groups along the lines of: "cutting expenditures for [X] isn't worthwhile because the total cost of [X] is such a minimal part of the federal budget.  I think I've seen that from farm groups, the food movement, and groups worried about NEA and NEH.  I suspect it will be a popular meme as we move into the budgetary furor between Obama, Dems, and the new Republican House.

The argument is, of course, utter nonsense. Nonsense at least in a good government sense.  If X is a program worth doing at some level, it's worth doing at that level.  If not, it can and should be cut back to whatever level makes it worthwhile, which could be zero. How big a program is in comparison to overall expenditures is meaningless. The problem is we can't agree on the "worth doing" and "some level".  The rhetoric of the argument invites us to recognize the problem and move on to some other program of perhaps a bigger size.  It's the converse of what I think Sen. Russell Long said: "don't tax you, don't tax me, tax that fellow behind the tree".

What it means is we'll likely have some across-the-board cuts: spread the pain around.  It's not the best way to administer, but it works in a democracy.

Changing Times--Remembering Happy

Happy is still around, I found as I checked her wikipedia entry.  Nelson Rockefeller's divorce of his first wife, Happy's divorce of her husband, and their quick remarriage to each other, meaning the disruption of the lives of a bunch of children, all paved the way for our modern disaster: the nomination of Goldwater in 1964 instead of Rocky, the rise of Reagan to prominence with the "speech", Reagan's election in 1980, and the setting of the bar so low as to permit a charming demagogue to dream of the Presidency.  (I know, I might be exaggerating, but just a tad.)

I recall it to mind because of the NYTimes article on the new governor, Mr. Cuomo, and his live-in girlfriend, Sandra Lee, of whom I'd never heard.  What was a scandal in 1962 is totally unremarkable in 2011; 49 years do make a difference.

So Much for Global Warming?

Since I started the day, and therefore the year, in a depressed mode, let me pass on some other good news. Via John Phipps, the latest graph from NASA showing that local temperatures don't reflect reality.  And, via Treehugger, this graphic from Skeptical Science summarizes indications of a warming globe.

A Depressing Way to Start the New Year

From the Times Nate Silver-- 538 blog, in a post analyzing Sarah Palin's prospects:

There was a time not too long ago, back when President Obama’s standing was a little stronger, when you’d hear the argument that some of the Republican candidates might sit 2012 out, figuring that 2016 would present a clearer path toward victory. You don’t really hear that anymore. Mr. Obama will not be easy to defeat: his approval ratings have stopped their slide. But clearly, he is beatable. If his approval ratings are in November 2012 what they are right now — somewhere in the mid-to-high 40s — a reasonably strong Republican nominee would be about even-money to beat him, based on historical precedent. [emphasis added]

It's a good analysis, which makes his current assessment of Obama's electability even more depressing.

Are You a Screwball? Metaphors

A post at York Town Square provides a definition of "screwball", the definitive one.  It sounds logical to me, though a fast search doesn't reveal any confirmation.  But I know filter screens can clog, and I can imagine bouncing balls could vibrate it enough to keep it clear, and such motion (brownian, perhaps) would be erratic, erratic enough to lead to the modern definition of "screwball".

Food Waste

A while back I posted on the waste of food in the US, arguing that it was mostly due to our desire for choice.  I noted a contrast today in a NYTimes piece on the likelihood of soaring food prices in 2011:

China, which only really uses global markets for soybeans, is fretting over soaring shop prices for goods as diverse as pork and seaweed. In India, a fifth of the population is undernourished, according to the United Nations. Both countries have their own issues; for instance, in India, awful infrastructure means a third of produce spoils before it reaches the market. But something is clearly making the problem worse.  [emphasis added]

 For those curious, the "something" referred to in the last sentence is claimed to be an abundance of money.

Why Healthcare Is Costly

A nugget from a NYTimes article on the problems of providing adequate Wi-Fi connectivity to conferences, particularly of techies.

"“I’ve been to health care conferences where no one brings a laptop,” said Ross Mayfield, president of the business software company Socialtext and a technology conference regular."

 That's sad, and also revealing.  I doubt there's any conference in USDA where laptops aren't present, at least those conferences where there are worker bees.

Dan Drezner Decides to be Less Genuine

My takeaway from his post on being interviewed on cable news (taking off from Ta Nehisi-Coates post) is:

His fault: "I genuinely want to answer the question asked of me. "

His New Year's resolution: to improve as an interviewee.

You Think?

From a post on sex at Barking Up the Wrong Tree:

"Taking the data set as a whole, almost the only way to make the men’s and women’s answers consistent is for there to be some women in the United States who have enormous numbers of sexual partners without reporting that fact in our survey data. It is possible that this is because of the existence of prostitutes. An alternative, and perhaps more likely, explanation is that men overestimate."[emphasis added]

Central Cities Safer Than Suburbs?

That's the gist of a Grist post, based on a UVA study. Turns out the risk from things like car accidents and drunk driving outweighs the risk from the crime we think of when "central cities" are mentioned.

Cash Leasing Increasing?

Extension reports an increase in cash leasing as opposed to shares, suggesting an increase in the use of crop insurance to handle risk means farmers are more able to accept the increased risk of cash leasing.  There's another possible contributory cause: the declining impact of farm program payments. Relatively speaking, such payments are less important these days; payments have gone down and prices have gone up.  When payment limitation is a problem, there's an advantage to share leasing. But with the lesser importance of farm programs, there's also less incentive to worry about payment limitation in managing your affairs.

Merry Christmas from a Procrastinator

Haven't finished a lot of posts I wanted to, but I wish you all a Merry Christmas.

Let All Populists Rejoice

According to this blog post of a study, Harvard Law students are no good (i.e., their free representation of indigents didn't help, and actually delayed decisions).

I Use E-Mail, I'm a Geezer

All that fits this Times piece: usage of email by oldtimers is up; by teens is way down.

What Gripes Me: The Golden Rule

As in this case reported in the Times:

"Deutsche Bank agreed to pay $553 million and admit to criminal wrongdoing on Tuesday, settling a long-running investigation into tax shelter fraud that prosecutors say generated billions of dollars in bogus tax benefits."

"... Deutsche Bank will avoid prosecution for helping 2,100 customers evade taxes through 2,300 financial transactions. The arrangements, which took place between 1996 and 2002, helped wealthy Americans report more than $29 billion in fraudulent tax losses, according to the Justice Department."

Them as has the gold, rules; or at least break the rules.  (I know, Republicans, this is class warfare.  The war of class on the masses. Can anyone guess I'm not in a holiday mood today?)