Mr.Beauregarde on Victory in Europe Day

A post on the remembrance of VE day in middle France, where no ministers or priests participate in the marches, where the headquarters of the Gestapo is still there, now used as an adult education centre, where the boundary of Vichy France is just 5 minutes away, and where a 15-year old identifies Hitler as an actor.

Am I Playing With House Money?

George Will and I don't normally see eye-to-eye, but his post on reaching 70, a tad after I did, is something I can mostly agree with.

He cites the end of racial segregation, the emancipation of women, the end of the Cold War, the advance of medicine, as major milestones he's seen.  Doesn't mention gay rights or the emancipation of the mind, AKA the Internet, or the liberation of the aged and their  by extending Social Security and creating Medicare.  But that's nitpicking, which I'm good at. 

Kids on the Farm

The Cotton Wife has a picture of a cute redhead.  New Yorker has a piece on Ree Drummond, also a cute redhead, who apparently is the biggest blogger of farm/ranch life (unfortunately just an abstract), but her blog is here. (Might as well add to her audience.) One common thread: kids learn to drive young on farms.

Am I a Hybrid

David Roberts at Grist has a post discussing a piece by a couple of military types, thinking about the future in the 21st century. He includes this paragraph to support his claim the military men are liberal:

"The most comprehensive review of personality and political orientation to date is a 2003 meta-analysis of 88 prior studies involving 22,000 participants. The researchers—John Jost of NYU, Arie Kruglanski of the University of Maryland, and Jack Glaser and Frank Sulloway of Berkeley—found that conservatives have a greater desire to reach a decision quickly and stick to it, and are higher on conscientiousness, which includes neatness, orderliness, duty, and rule-following. Liberals are higher on openness, which includes intellectual curiosity, excitement-seeking, novelty, creativity for its own sake, and a craving for stimulation like travel, color, art, music, and literature.

Sounds to me like I'm something of a hybrid: I think I'd rate well on conscientiousness, but I don't like fast decisions (i.e., I'm indecisive); I have intellectual curiosity, but I don't do well on stimulation: change is bad at the personal level.

One Reason To Follow International Politics

I blogged about my interest in politics, specifically international politics back in the Cold War days.

The Archives does a document of the day, and yesterday's was a reminder of why it was easy to stay interested in foreign policy back in the 50's. It was a photograph showing the effects of a nuclear blast on a house a mile away.  Not only did we have Cold Wars (the Berlin airlift) and Hot Wars (French Indo-China, Korea) but we had nuclear and thermonuclear testing, all of which filled the news columns.

The Glass Ceiling Cracks a Bit More--Osama's Tracker

 "And notably, the NGA [National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency] is the first intel agency to be headed by a woman: Letitia Long, an intelligence veteran." from a National Journal story on the tracking of Osama bin Laden.

(I suspect it traces its history back to, in part, the Army Map Service.

The Definition of Perpetually Bad Traffic:

From Chris Blattman: "Cars get snarled so long in traffic there are now shoe salesmen by the roadside. You have time to try on many, many pairs

Government Help for Flooded Farms

In the wake of the decision to blow the levee on the Mississippi, farmers are concerned about compensation for their flooded fields/prevent planting.  Back in the old days, when we had a disaster program in ASCS that was unrelated to crop insurance, for a while we had a rule saying: if the cause of the crop damage was something someone did, the farmer had recourse against the someone and the losses weren't eligible for disaster payments.  I remember early in my career a case of drifting herbicide which damaged a cotton crop.

And there were limitations on whether land between the river and the levee, or under Corps of Engineer easement, could be designated as set-aside

Later, the redoubtable Jamie Whitten, after whom the USDA administration building is named because he was the long-time head of House Ag (or maybe it was the Ag appropriations subcommittee) some of whose constituents were hurt by our rules, pushed through a special provision saying Uncle Sugar would pay regardless.

One of the good things about periodic redos of programs is you can clean out the special provisions which clutter up programs, like cow flops on a clean stable floor.

(Seems apparent to me that the Corps of Engineers should pay the compensation, not FCIC or FSA.  But that's not going to happen according to the Times article.

[Updated--see this farmgate post by Stu Ellis.] Politically and administratively it may be better to handle the situation as if the farmers had crop insurance, etc.  Of course, that once again creates moral hazard and lessens the incentive for farmers to comply with the rules in advance, because their representatives will get them off the hook afterwards.  It's called, not "too big to fail" but "too many votes to fail".]

My Precocious Interest in Politics: WWII and Cold War

Megan McArdle links to a post describing teenagers ignorance of Osama bin Laden. She says:

 I didn't know what Iran Contra was when I was in high school, and I was a sophomore when it happened.  Teenagers live in their own little world, only tangentially connected to the one the rest of us occupy.

Now she is sharp and interested in politics, but that experience contrasts sharply with my own experience.  Her commenters tend to agree, though some report early interest in politics. Personally I can remember opining pompously to a classmate about the possible successor to Stalin (at age 12-3?) and sitting on a panel to discuss current events in fourth grade.

Part of my early interest was aspirational; I was surrounded by older people whose opinions I valued and needed to keep up with the times.  I also had an elder sister who enjoyed the role of pedant. 

But part of it was likely the times: we'd come out of WWII and emerged into the Cold War, with the USSR getting the atomic bomb, and the arms race.  So current events were much hotter then than now, or even in the 1980's when McArdle was a youth.

A (Textile) Piece of History I Didn't Know

"Elihu Yale, who lived and worked in India for nearly three decades with the British East India Company from 1670 to 1699 donated to the Collegiate School of Connecticut three bales of goods- Madras cotton, silk and other textiles from India – laying the foundation of their first building."

We think of textiles as British, not Indian. From a good post at Chapati Mystery: Remember Eric Rudoph?

Thank You, L. Norman Adams and David Brion Davis

Turns out May 3 is Teacher Appreciation Day.  Since I've never thanked my teachers, let me do it here:

L. Norman Adams was my high school history/social studies teacher, for whom I wrote many pages of papers and with whom I engaged in much back and forth, focused, if I remember correctly, on the nature and course of the Cold War.  I failed to keep up my correspondence with Norm so I lost track of him.

David Brion Davis was a young professor of American intellectual history, whose 2-term survey course in my sophomore year was challenging and amazing.   He went on to win prizes for his books on slavery.

Looking back, what they had in common was an intense interest in and caring about their subject.

Thank you.

Conservation Versus Direct Payments

Article in the Post today on the challenges conservation programs are facing, as opposed to direct payments.

One quote puzzles me:

“There is a growing feeling that [Congress] must find a way to make sure that the cuts affect everyone,” said Ferd Hoefner, policy director for the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, “to make sure the mega-producers are not the ones let off the hook this time around. “
To get around cuts in the past, corporate farms would add a partner or two that could then apply for separate subsidies, thereby restoring the overall take to prior levels."

My impression was that attribution of payments was going to mostly take care of that problem, but apparently not to the satisfaction of NSAC.  Come to think of it, I haven't seen any analysis of how well or poorly that change in the 2008 law is working.

Because my blogging has been slow because of plumbing problems, I'll throw in here a renewal of my proposal: instead of trying to apply a cap on payments, apply a factored reduction, increasing as the total amount of payments rises.  (Think income tax in reverse.)

Slavery in the Shadow of the Capitol

Found this link in doing research for my cousin--unfortunately it's from 2001 and the links supporting it seem to be broken:

Foreign travelers accounts from the 1830 and 1840 described the Robey and
Williams slave pens which stood along the Mall in the shadow of the Capitol;
the two were often juxtaposed in artworks, and the presence of slave pens in
the center of the nation's capitol captured the attention of abolitionists.
(Ironically, today the Museum of African Art sits less than a block away from
the former location of the Robey and Williams slave pens.)

Biggest U.S. College?

According to this NYTimes article, Miami-Dade is:

With an enrollment of 170,000, Miami Dade is the country’s largest college (not including online universities). Ninety percent of its students are minorities, and it graduates more black and Hispanic students than any other college. This is no small accomplishment in light of the country’s stubbornly low college attendance and graduation rates among minorities.

It's drawn 3 Presidents to speak at commencement.

US and India on Food

Ajay Shah's blog has a post discussing a new CPI (consumer price index) for India.  What's interesting is the weighting

Sub Group		New CPI
	Rural	Urban	All India	CPI IW
Food, beverages and tobacco	59.31	37.15	49.71	50.20
Fuel and Light	10.42	8.40	9.49	6.25
Clothing, bedding and footwear	5.36	3.91	4.73	13.28
Housing	0.00	22.53	9.77	5.33
Miscellaneous	24.91	28.00	26.31	24.94

Don't know what the weights are for the U.S. but wikipedia gives this: They are weighted this way: Housing: 41.4%, Food and Beverage: 17.4%, Transport: 17.0%, Medical Care: 6.9%, Other: 6.9%, Apparel: 6.0%, Entertainment: 4.4%

The Trump Game: "I Am So Proud of Myself Because..."

All you need to do to play the game is to complete the sentence made notorious by the Donald:

"I am so proud of myself because...."


Extra credit if you complete "I am so proud of myself because I've accomplished something that nobody else has been able to accomplish...."

Why Do Things Go to Hell in High School

I've been distracted by a plumbing crisis, but I saw a favorable piece on Jeb Bush mention that Florida scores under him did great, except they fell off when tested in high school. Matt Yglesias has a piece on Milwaukee, comparing scores of different systems, but they all fall down in high school.  I suspect it's a tribute to one three-letter word: sex.

Bureaucrats and Experts

What's the difference between a bureaucrat and an expert?  Here's a NYTimes science essay in which a doctor compares his relationship with plumbers over a puzzling problem with his dishwasher to the relationship between patients who have their own theories of their illnesses and a doctor.  He ends:

When matters of personal health (or home appliances) are at stake, we want a lot more than expertise from our experts. The rational world suddenly loses its appeal; dull, steady scientific observation seems only dull and steady. We want some pixie dust, a little magic, an eccentric genius who can see through the usual mumbo-jumbo to the core of the problem (paging Dr. House).
But until our prince comes, we are left with the most basic, bare-bones determination: do we trust this guy or not? And this decision, rather than following along a perfectly manicured line of reasoning and evidence, relies on that least scientific of all human inclinations — the simple leap of faith.

 So what distinguishes a bureaucrat dealing with the public from a plumber dealing with a homeowner or a doctor dealing with a patient? I suspect in some cases, perhaps many, an FSA technician at the desk in a county office is seen as an "expert" by the farmer she's serving, rather than being viewed as a "bureaucrat".  One thing which strikes me is: in the doctor/patient, plumber/homeowner scenarios both parties share the same goal, curing the illness or fixing the appliance.  When the relationship is viewed as bureaucrat and customer/client there's little or no assumption of a shared goal.

The Ultimate in Customization of Farm Programs

The Rural Blog has a piece reporting a suggestion southern farmers will push for an individual option: the ability to choose between direct payments and the ACRE program.  I guess it's not the first time farmers have had a choice: the SURE program was also an option.  I understand the logic: northern farmers like crop insurance, southerners don't, so you make both sides happy by giving them a choice.  It's logical, but it's confusing to explain and hard to administer.  I hope someone is asking GAO to look at the tradeoffs of offering options.

Form and Reality: Binding Signatures and Notaries Public

Our legal system tends to operate on notarized signatures: you take a document to a notary public, present proof of identity, sign the document and the notary impresses her seal.  But these days it seems one could document a signing by technology:  use a video camera to record the proof of identity and the person signing. Of course, it's likely it will take a century or two to change the rules to use the new technology.

The Military Bureaucracy

The Project on Government Oversight cites a Sen. McCaskill oversight hearing with reference to "brass creep", then includes some stuff on the Air Force's bureaucracy:

• “In the last seven years alone, the service has shed nearly 43,000 airmen while adding 44 generals.”

I'm not sure USDA would do much better.

The Importance of Statistics

Via Marginal Revolution, a post which explains why the housing bubble never showed up in the cost of living index.

And Yglesias wonders whether finance really adds to the GDP.

 The bottom line to me: there's the set of activities which are paid for; the set of activities which are reflected in various indices, the set of activities which provide real value to people.  The three sets overlap, but don't coincide.

Food Movement Meets the Tea Party

Partly due to the rise of the tea party, there have been a number of laws passed and more bills proposed which have the effect of exempting a state from some sort of federal regulation, whether or immigration, health care, or whatever.  Now the food movement has gotten into the action, passing local ordinances exempting locally grown food from state and federal regulation, as in this  Maine case 

On the anniversary of the start of the Civil War, it's a good reminder that Americans have a deep rooted impulse to secede from government, whether the subject is slavery or food.

Surprising Sentence: Cell Phones

"Today, almost three-quarters of the world's people carry a wireless phone"  from a Wall Street Journal piece via Ann Althouse. 

The focus of the piece is on the ability of social scientists to study data associated with cell phones and smart phones, etc. and draw conclusions on politics, mental health, physical health, and lots of other stuff.. As one says: "a gods-eye view".

Fed Salaries: Government Employee With Summer Cottage

A different perspective on federal salaries: in the 1930's my uncle was a researcher at Beltsville on animal nutrition. Had a nice house in the DC suburbs and a summer cottage near Annapolis while supporting wife and two young kids.  Today I doubt an ARS scientist could manage a cottage on a single salary. Most likely he'd be saving money for college tuition.  Of course, even back then a private feed company hired him away from USDA.

Human Ingenuity in Evading Rules

One of the constants in a bureaucrat's life is the fact the people with whom she deals will often spend a good deal of effort in evading the rules.  Whether it's taxpayers stretching the truth in preparing tax returns or seeking legal or semi-legal tax shelters, farmers reorganizing their farming enterprises to evade limitations on farm program payments, or disaster victims claiming losses which exist only in their mind, evading rules is ever-present.

Chris Blattman is a professor who runs experiments in Africa.  The gold standard of social science experiments is "randomization", dividing subjects into two matched groups and trying something on one group you don't use on the other.  He ran into the rule evasion phenomena in a recent experiment.  He ends the discussion:

"The researchee defeats the researcher. I wonder if they realized that they could completely insure one another and get the outcome they want. Would I be that surprised if one managed to track down my blog and saw the idea as it is? I’m now not so sure…

One True Sentence

From Kevin Drum:

The Great Collapse was a big enough, and unexpected enough, event that it should have changed your mind at least a little bit about something.

So what has it done to my mind?

• Less credibility for big shot managers.  When you read about Lehman Brothers going under, or Citigroup's troubles, their books were so screwed up they didn't know where they were. Outsiders checking their books would find a few billion more losses every day or so. 
• Alan Greenspan loses most of his reputation.
• Less credibility for economists, particularly Bush's.
• Diminished reputation for Barney Frank and other Dems who ignored warning signals. I'm not convinced by the right wing thesis that pushing home ownership was the original sin which caused the collapse, but the push to get low income people into home ownership created an atmosphere in which the con men who made liar's loans could flourish.

That's a few lessons; there may be more.

Supply Side Solutions to the Cost of Medical Care

I commented on this on Yglesias's blog in the past. Rather than focusing only on cutting demand, either by regulating what procedures and devices are approved (Obamacare) or by cutting the money available to spend on medical care (Ryancare), we need to seriously expand the supply of care, thereby cutting prices and hopefully costs..

We could do this by opening our gates to all medical professionals from other countries. Here's an interesting post on Chris Blattman's blog about the effects of such migration, including these sentences: "For decades, more nurses have left the Philippines to work abroad than leave any other country on earth. Yet in the Philippines today there are more Registered Nurses per capita than in the United Kingdom. This happened because so many Filipinos trained up as nurses to take advantage of opportunities abroad that this more than offset the departures."

We could do this by contracting with some universities to develop new schools of nursing and medicine.

We could do this by changing the laws so someone licensed as a nurse or doctor in one state could practice in any state.

We could  reduce certification requirements, offsetting the laxity with increased transparency. I'd rather be treated by a doctor with lesser qualifications but a long history of success than vice versa.

We could forgive a portion of student loan indebtedness for those medical students who go into primary care for x years.

We could allow nurses to do in medical clinics what we allow them to do in schools.

We could encourage medical tourism: people going to Mexico or India for operations (as the Amish do now).

Coates and a Hispanic Museum

Ta-Nahesi Coates has a post on the push for a Hispanic-American museum in DC, playing off a NYTimes report.  The comments are particularly good.  I revert to my suggestion that the USDA Administration building be converted into a museum.

Nagging: Redundancy or Consistency?

This study, according to Barking Up the Wrong Tree, shows that nagging works. When managers gave the same message over and over, the results improved.  But I'm tempted to disagree.  Back when I was a new manager and having my problems, as in cursing at an employee, my division director gave me a message.  He pointed to another manager in the division, a loud, boisterous man, WWII veteran whose ship had been sunk under him, who was an obvious male chauvinist. That made him seem to be an odd fit to supervise a female manager after a reorganization.  The director pointed out that the vet was consistent; he was always the same. Further he was fair, and the woman in question was assertive and wouldn't take any crap off him  The director said in his view consistency was the great managerial virtue.  Employees could adjust to any managerial style, so long as it was consistent.  Conversely, it was dangerous to be erratic, to be up and down, to jump from one great idea to another.

So it's possible the good results from repetitive messages was caused less by the repetition than by the consistency.

NRCS and Streamlining Delivery Initiative

NRCS has its Streamlining Delivery Initiative, which sounds a bit like their version of MIDAS.  Give credit to them:

• they have a nice graphic outlining what I would call the "enterprise architecture", or at least the flow of apps.
• they put up a wiki page on the initiative .  (I haven't quite figured out "wikiagro", whether it's an official NRCS wiki or not.

Not sure how this works with FSA's MIDAS.

How To Raise the Debt Limit

Seems to me it would be logical for the Republicans in the House to take Obama's proposed"fail-safe" and attach it to the increase of the debt limit.

Three Cups

I read Greg Mortenson's Three Cups of Tea fairly early and was very impressed.  Now 60 Minutes and Jon Krakauer have debunked parts of the narrative.  Seems to me Dan Drezner has a good take on the whole thing.

Republican Study Committee Budget

Following are excerpts from the RSC budget (not Rep. Ryan's):

SUPPORT MARKET-BASED PROGRAMS BY ELIMINATING THE DIRECT PAYMENT (DP) PROGRAM.
The DP program provides cash subsidies to commodity producers, capped at $40,000 annually. The payments are based on a historical measure of a farm’s production acreage, and they do not vary based on actual production or commodity prices. Direct payments were originally established in 1996 as a transitional program. However, the subsidies have not been reduced over time.

The Washington Post estimated that between 2000 and 2006, the federal government made $1.3 billion in direct payments to people who do not even farm. Recently, the Iowa Farm Bureau proposed eliminating the DP program. While the President has called for lowering the cap in FY 2012, this plan would eliminate the Direct Payment program entirely. The savings would amount to $4 billion in FY 2012 and $50 billion over ten years. Although this non-market based program would be terminated, growers could still receive support payments from other support programs such as the Average Crop Revenue Election (ACRE) and Marketing Loan Assistance programs.

PROHIBIT NEW ENROLLMENTS IN THE CONSERVATION STEWARDSHIP PROGRAM.
The Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP) provides annual payments to producers for five years in exchange for undertaking various land improvements. However, payments under the program can be made to producers who have already undertaken conservation measures.

Beginning in FY 2012, new enrollees would be prohibited from entering into the program. This policy would result in FY 2012 savings of $35 million and approximately $10.5 billion in savings over ten years. The CBO stated that the “criteria used to determine improvements in existing conservation practices are not readily apparent, and the absence of objective measurements could result in higher payments than necessary.” The RSC’s proposed option is based on the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform’s recommendation to put limits on this program.

PROHIBIT GENERAL ENROLLMENTS IN THE CONSERVATION RESERVE PROGRAM (CRP). The CRP was established by the 1985 Farm Bill. Its purpose is to remove land from agricultural production, and it is the federal government’s largest private land retirement program. Under the CRP, producers are paid to plant grass or trees on retired acres. Currently, approximately 31 million acres of land are enrolled in the program. The program is economically destructive and takes away farm land that could be used for things such as corn and biomass production. Beginning in FY 2012, new general enrollments in CRP would be prohibited, resulting in approximately $9 billion in savings over ten years.

REDUCE THE PREMIUM SUBSIDY IN THE CROP INSURANCE PROGRAM.
Farmers use the Federal Crop Insurance Program to protect their crops from perils by purchasing policies that are sold and serviced by private vendors. The federal government subsidizes about 60 percent of the premiums paid for this program. Beginning in FY 2012, the federal government’s subsidy would be reduced to 50 percent of the crop insurance premium. This would result in a savings of $400 million for FY 2012 and $11.8 billion over ten years. Reductions of this magnitude in the subsidy rate likely would not substantially affect the level of program participation.

ELIMINATE THE FOREIGN MARKET DEVELOPMENT PROGRAM (FMDP).
The FMDP is used by agricultural trade associations and commodity groups to help promote exports and provide nutritional and technical assistance to other countries. This program would be terminated beginning in FY 2012, resulting in FY 2012 savings of $35 million and savings of $350 million over ten years. This initiative is something that the private sector would otherwise be spending money on anyway. The private sector should be responsible for promoting its own products, as it receives the profits from the sales of these products.

ELIMINATE THE MARKET ACCESS PROGRAM (MAP).
The MAP is intended to promote overseas marketing of U.S. agricultural products. MAP funds consumer promotions, market research, trade shows, advertising campaigns, and other programs designed to subsidize the sale of brand-name products in foreign markets by private cooperatives, trade associations, and businesses. Taxpayers should not be forced to pick up the tab for this kind of corporate welfare. The National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform even targeted this program as one in need of change. This program would be terminated in FY 2012, resulting in an annual savings of $200 million and $2 billion in savings over ten years. According to the CBO, some analysts believe MAP “does not warrant additional funding because the extent to which it has developed markets or replaced private expenditures with public funds is not known.”

ELIMINATE WOOL AND MOHAIR SUBSIDIES.
The federal government first enacted price support for wool and mohair in 1947, and the National Wool Act of 1954 established direct payments for wool and mohair producers for the purpose of encouraging production of wool as an essential and strategic commodity. This support was last re-authorized in 2008 despite a complete lack of a compelling need for government support of mohair. Beginning in FY 2012, wool and mohair subsidies would be eliminated, saving taxpayers $4 million in FY 2012 and $40 million over ten years. This budget would return control over supply, demand, and price of wool and mohair to the free market.

Pot-Filled Fantasies of Farming

Treehugger has a post on "sunless farming" (not vertical):

The idea is to figure out how to grow crops in these regulated indoor places so that anyone can grow crops anywhere -- from buildings placed next to supermarkets and malls, to high-rises with a spare floor to rent, and so on. The researchers believe that any space of 1,075 square feet set up with the right equipment and layers of plants could provide a fresh diet of produce to 140,000 people.

Amazingly, some people actually take this seriously.  Maybe they're smoking pot, which by the way is the major crop which is already being grown under lights.  This Freakonomics post links to research on the energy demands and carbon dioxide impact of our current marijuana industry. Two paragraphs:

California, the mecca of medical marijuana, is by far the worst offender. There, the indoor pot industry is responsible for about 3 percent of the entire state’s electricity use, or about 8 percent of all household use.

Some of the biggest growing facilities have a carbon footprint on par with many industrial medical and technology operations. According to Mills, a typical indoor marijuana growing facility has “lighting as intense as that found in an operating room (500-times more than needed for reading), 6-times the air-change rate of a bio-tech laboratory and 60-times that of a home, and the electric power intensity of a data center.”

Cutting the Deficit, Cutting Safety

Part of the fallout from 2011 budget fight is described in this article in the Washington Times:

The Justice Department is freezing efforts to create a single radio network that allows its various agencies to talk to each other — a key recommendation of the Sept. 11 panel.

 I remember blogging on the need for such a network way back near the beginning of this blog.

Stock Up on Peanut Butter Now

That's based on the word passed on by Farm Policy, which reports Texas peanut growers are switching their acreage to cotton, based on the high prices for that crop.  As a result, we might have to import peanuts from Argentina.

My Taxes Are Too Low (and So Are the Obamas)

I've noted my procrastination, so you'd expect I would file my tax returns today.  I have to say my taxes are too low, we should be paying more.  And so should the Obamas, even though they seem to be paying about 25 percent.  And worst of all IRS doesn't have enough people.

Paarlberg on Foodie and Libertarian Myths

Via Farm Policy, Robert Paarlberg has an article at Good Food.  A couple excerpts here:

Our federal farm programs are designed to supplement the income of farmers, not subsidize the production of food. Most federal farm support programs either give cash to farmers whether they grow more crops or not, or boost farm income by raising crop prices through import restrictions, market controls, or temporary land set-asides, all of which make food artificially expensive, not artificially cheap.

One USDA study in 2008 found that over the previous 25 years the price of un-subsidized fruits and vegetables—controlling for season and quality—had fallen at almost exactly the same rate as the price of chocolate chip cookies, cola, ice cream, and potato chips. So that other popular claim—Americans are obese because unsubsidized healthy foods have become more expensive—is also bogus. 

This Is Surprising: Pun in Stone 35000 Years Old

From a NYTimes book review:

In the caves of our Paleolithic ancestors, 35,000-year-old figurines have been found, each appearing to be a naked woman when viewed from one angle and an erect penis when viewed from another.

Political Appointees Versus Careerists

The chief flack at USDA is leaving to join Rahm Emanuel in Chicago.  She's been charged with discrimination according to this post.

At DHS there was tension between the careerists in charge of FOIA requests and the political appointees.

Without any knowledge of the particulars I'd suggest the following could be true:

• the political appointees are young.  Except at the highest levels, political staff appointees tend to be whippersnappers on the way up, looking to make their mark.  They've attached themselves to the bigwigs (i.e. Secretary and below), or rather they've successfully networked with the bigwigs. 
• the political appointees are inexperienced.  Likely they don't arrive with an extensive background in the rules of FOIA, or the agency or department.  Likely they don't arrive with a lot of experience managing people. 
• the political appointees are attuned to the expectations of the Secretary and the President.  That's their reference group; that's who they want to impress.
• the career employees are old.  The political appointees are dealing with the top of the career hierarchy, which usually means people who've risen within the ranks, meaning they're older.
• the career employees know the rules and the agency.
• the career employees have seen political appointees come and go, so they're likely to be skeptical of  them and their new ideas. By the same token, they're less impressed with the Secretary and the President than the appointees.
 

All in all, a formula for conflict.

Prohibit Contractors Who Are Delinquent on Taxes

Since I yesterday urged the firing of federal employees if they didn't have an agreement to pay back taxes, it's only fair I should today urge the blacklisting of any Federal contractor who hasn't paid their taxes. POGO has a summary of the problems

New USDA Website

USDA has redesigned their main website.  I had some criticisms in the comments, but my opinion is probably idiosyncratic.  [Updated:  here's the link to the comments.]

Most Terrifying Sentence of the Year

" Not only could Republicans win the majority, but it’s within the realm of possibility that they could gain a net of 13 seats, which would allow them to beat any Democratic filibuster in the next Congress."  From a Nate Silver rumination on the upcoming Senate elections.

Fire Bureaucrats for Terminal Stupidity

On the one hand, Michelle Singletary of the Post has a column entitled "Don't Be Afraid of the Taxman" (taxperson?)  On the other hand, the Post's Federal Eye discusses a move in the House by Republicans to fire any federal employee who owes back taxes.  Put the two together and I reach a position which may be surprising: fire federal employees (and DC councilmen, are you listening Marion Barry) who owe back taxes without getting a repayment agreement within 6 months.

A failure to get an agreement is prima facie evidence of terminal stupidity.

I'd hasten to add, I don't think the House Reps are going about it the right way, no hearings, no full consideration. But federal employees are civil servants and should meet a higher standard than ordinary mortals.

Those Overpaid Bureaucrats at CIA

Seem to be taking their knowledges, skills and abilities to find ( lower-paid ?) jobs in the private sector according to the Washington Post.

The Return of Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Thanks to Obama

25 years ago when we were also concerned about deficits, one of the instruments was Gramm-Rudman-Hollings,which provided for automatic cuts in expenditures if deficits exceeded a pre-determined level. 

President Obama makes a return of GRH an important part of his deficit program.  See Keith Hennessey's summary [See this Yglesias post for more discussion.]

GRH is burned in my memory, given the problems it caused us to administer it. If it returns, I wish FSA luck.

Erosion, NRCS, andConservation Compliance

NYTimes has an article on erosion, focused on Iowa erosion rates.  Hits the highlights: the rates of erosion, the impact of high crop prices, land coming out of the Conservation Reserve Program, strip cropping and contour farming as incompatible with big equipment,  renters possibly sacrificing the long range health of the land for short range profit, NRCS enforcement of conservation compliance rules, etc. It even includes the hit to NRCS administrative budget in the new Continuing Resolution. The only thing it didn't mention was the similiarity of the current situtation with that in 1973 (and Earl Butz, when the economic situation

What's not clear to me is how much of Iowa is considered to be highly erodible.  I remember visiting Sherman County, KS for Infoshare in 1991 and farmers were still bitching about the classification of most of their land as HE.

Dependence on Foreign Imports

Alex Tabarrok seems to think this is funny, but coffee is serious business. I'm sure FSA would be able to implement a program to encourage the growing of coffee.

Was MIDAS Hit?

From a Federal Computer Week post on the budget resolution:

More directly, the Agriculture Department’s CIO office would get $40 million, which is $22 million less than in 2010 and $24 million less than the president wanted.