Increasing Government Productivity?

Matt Yglesias has this post saying the era of big government ended in the 70's, including a graphic showing the ratio of government workers to private sector workers. 

That says to me there either was a great increase in government productivity since 1975 or there was an unheralded decline in the scope of the federal government.  I don't see any other alternatives.  So, Tea partiers, which one is it?

The Way Congress Works

Congress believes in setting tough requirements, until they start to affect your constituents.  Then it's Katy bar the door as your stalward representatives run for the exits--from Farm Policy

“Some Vermont farmers affected by Tropical Storm Irene are ineligible for U.S. Department of Agriculture disaster assistance because they did not have crop insurance when the storm hit, a requirement under current law. The Welch/Gibson Bill (H.R. 2905) would temporarily waive this requirement, allowing farmers access to USDA assistance. Farmers taking advantage of the waiver would be required to purchase crop insurance.”

Organic Agriculture Is Profitable

I've been skeptical of organic agriculture's promises, so it's only fair I should highlight this piece from the Agronomy people, reporting on a long term U of Minnesota (my dad's alma mater--go gophers) study. It finds that organic agriculture is more profitable than conventional over an 18-year period.  However:

What gave organic production the edge wasn’t higher crop yields, however; instead it was organic price premiums. In their absence, the net return from a 2-yr, conventional corn-soybean rotation averaged $342 per acre, compared to $267/ac for a 4-yr organic rotation (corn-soybean-oat/alfalfa-alfalfa), and $273/ac for its 4-yr conventional counterpart. When a full organic premium was applied, though, the average net return from organic production rose to $538/ac, significantly outperforming the conventional systems both in terms of profitability and risk. And organic production was still more profitable when the price premium was reduced by 50%.

Cost of production was also lower, because herbicides cost more than organic weed control methods.

Repeal the Law

This Federal Computer Week article says the Census Bureau is willing to talk about repealing the portion of the law which prevents them from making public their database of addresses.

And this subsequent article says Census is backing off.   They may save it for a second term, if there is one.

Elixir

Just finishing up on Elixir, A History of Water and Mankind, by Brian Kagan.  It's quite interesting, filled with facts.  See the Amazon reviews; it's getting about 4.5 stars.  What was most striking to me was the extent and sophistication of early efforts to control water, in many areas of the world long before I would have thought.  For example, the tunnels in ancient Crete and the qanats in the Middle East (Google wants to give you "Qantas" results when you search for "qanats").

It's also striking how often humans were succeeding in living in very marginal environments for many years, but then their efforts were overturned by a sharp change in the climate.

MIDAS Demo Comments Continued

User One thing which is not clear to me in the MIDAS demos is whether the "user" in the demos is conceived of as the tech in the county office or the producer online.  Conceptually I think it works to have the same basic software available to both, but to make it work I think you need an elaborate upfront security apparatus so that producer A can't change (or maybe even view) data pertaining to producer B but the technician for the office serving producers A and B can do everything.  That means an extensive validation process behind the scenes to check whether the current user has authority to manipulate the data to which she is requesting access.


Organizational Changes  The last demo module, on Reporting, includes a visual showing 12 systems currently in place which would be replaced by the software being demoed. I suspect there are several organizational units in DC, and perhaps in KC, which are currently responsible for the systems.  At least there were in my day and although USDA and FSA don't update their online organizational data as they used to (the USDA organizational directory is 4 years old), I've enough faith in the inertia of bureaucracy to believe it's true today.

One of my problems with the current FSA website, which I may or may not have mentioned, is the hodge-podge of services available online under the "Online Services" tab.  I suspect that's because different siloswithin FSA were responsible for creating the individual options, without having one outfit coordinating.  The result for any producer who tried to make use of online services would be an unfriendly and awkward user experience. 

So I wonder how FSA is going to set up organizationally to handle software development and delivery of services online?

Farmland Bubble Revisited

When people start talking about "phenomenal rises" in land prices, it's definitely a bubble.

Chicken Feed in 50 Lb Bags?

Do I feel like a male chauvinist pig this morning?  Via Yale Sustainable Food Project here's a piece on Female Farmers and people who complain about tools being designed for men and:

"Why, they asked, does chicken feed have to come in 50-pound bags?"

That's the first I've heard of that.  Back in the day, when we walked to school uphill both ways, both chicken and dairy feed came in 100 pound bags.  That was the test of a man.  We'd make a trip to the GLF (Grange League Federation--a co-op) store and load the pickup with bags of feed.  To make it up the hill from the Chenango River valley over to the Page Brook valley dad would have to use second gear, maybe first.  Then he'd back the truck to the henhouse and the barn to carry the bags in.

As a small boy I was impressed by the routine.  As I grew, I could help a little.  But it was a great day when I'd grown enough to be able to handle the bags. As I was born when dad was 52, the timing was right as well--he was losing the strength to handle the bags. To project onto all farm boys my feelings: farm boys have to compete with their fathers, something they can do because they're in the same

Of course, 100 lb bags of feed went the way of small farms--the efficient way to handle feed is in bulk. Bulk feed, bulk milk, bulk farms.

BTW--the women who asked the question quoted above are designing a line of tools:

Adams and Brensinger launched Green Heron Tools in 2008, the first company in the world to make farm equipment designed exclusively for the female body. Thanks to two grants from the USDA, they are releasing their Hergonomic Shovel-Spade (HERS) in the next couple weeks. Every feature is scientifically based on how a woman shovels. It's the first tool of its kind.

 I'm not sure I'm happy about USDA tax dollars going to help undermine patriarchy any more than it's already been undermined by bulk feed.

California Democrats Didn't Read Their Federalist Papers

That's my take-away from this piece on Sen. Feinstein's money problems with the suspect treasurer:

Feinstein said she and her campaign staff have been unable to access all their bank records at this point because Durkee alone controlled access to the account, which has made it difficult for them to assess how much money is gone.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0911/63299.html#ixzz1XrWq6EpO

If they'd remembered their government 101 class, they would have thought: "checks and balances", particularly when money is involved.

Cemeteries and Memorials

A couple random things from today's media--the Times has an article on the military leaving Camp Victory in Iraq.  Part of the process is dismantling the memorials erected to remember various deaths, one of which was going to be transported back to the states. Meanwhile Ann Althouse notes a Tampa Bay piece on memorials: apparently they already have 500 and are looking at more.

Also, when we come back from Herndon from our regular weekend visit to The Tortilla Factory, there's a wooden cross erected by the on-ramp to the Fairfax Parkway.  I assume it commemorates some teenager who lost control there and died in the accident.

Finally, there's the famous factoid about Reston: it has no cemeteries.

Discussion: in the old days when I was young, people would gather on Memorial Day at the cemetery to cleanup damage and remember the dead.  Commemorating death was a communal activity because the tombstones represented people were ancestors and relatives of the people living in the community.  As a little kid you'd go around and see the names on the big family stones: Thompson, Kittle, whatever, and be able to connect them to the farms and houses you saw along the roads.

Today we no longer have that community, that communal knowledge, and we likely no longer have that cemetery.  Hence the individualistic drive to commemorate a death, a tragedy, with something along the roadside.

My memories of course evoke a rural/small town atmosphere.  I'm sure in the big cities cemeteries were very different, particularly as regards class. But my memories were/are in stone; the inscriptions on the stones gradually fade and erode, but my great great grandmother's grave stone, who emigrated from Ireland and died in 1850, is still legible.  For better or worse, the more individualistic monuments of today don't have that enduring power.

Slashing Crop Insurance?

Here's  a quote from Farm Policy, which I could duplicate from other pieces of propaganda information put out by the friends of crop insurance.

The article noted that, “Federal lawmakers have slashed more than $12 billion from crop insurance programs since 2008, [Moran] said, noting that subsidized crop insurance is important in a state that this year was ravaged by everything from flooding to drought.

  In the interest of fairness I should point out that a "slash" is not always a "slash".  Suppose the direct payment program is cut by $1 billion, or conservation programs are cut by the same amount--those could be called "slashes".  But those slashes are not the same as the slashes of crop insurance.

Why? Because those programs are fixed amounts, and a cut to them is by a fixed amount.  But crop insurance is an entitlement, so the government's budgetary exposure is not constant.  The exposure goes up and down (mostly up recently) according to program participation and crop prices.  So those slashes are calculated, based on the current conditions and projections, but the real spending cuts can only be determined after the fact.

The second reason is more indirect: program proponents make sure everyone is aware of "slashes" to the entitlement, but the increases in the entitlement creep in on little cats paws.  I'm not really picking on crop insurance; the identical logic and political posturing occurs among proponents of food stamps.

Carter Returns: Zero Based Budgeting and Broccoli

Those of us who remember the distant past better than today will know that President Carter was elected on a promise to make the government more efficient and effective by moving to zero based budgeting.  That's why the federal government has been so great over the last 35 years.

Now the Senate Ag committee is directing USDA to do the same:

The Committee believes it is necessary to carefully examine each agency’s budget requirements from a zero base, rather than by reviewing only incremental changes as they occur year to year. Such a change in method would both assist the Committee’s appropriating and oversight responsibilities and it will also require agencies to systematically examine all of their budgetary requirements on an annual basis to ensure they relate properly to their mission within the Department. Therefore, the Committee directs the Secretary to develop and present USDA’s fiscal year 2013 budget requirements from a zero base and such presentation should include an examination and justification of each program, project, and activity and allocation of FTEs and related items. The Secretary is further instructed to provide a report to the Committee on Appropriations of both Houses of Congress by November 1, 2011, on the status of this directive.

Other nuggets from the report:

On reorganization, which must:

"follow a thoughtful analysis of implications for budgetary resources, services to customers and employees, and inherent dynamics within the Department that might result. Toward that objective, before moving forward with the implementation of any substantive reorganization, the Department is instructed to conduct a detailed analysis of the savings, efficiencies, and implications of these changes. In addition, an understanding of the methodology used for determining these factors and some form of demonstration of the results anticipated is required. Any timetable for implementation of the changes suggested obviously will be driven by the fiscal resources available and it may be prudent to give consideration to a tiered implementation as conditions dictate rather than a full scale Departmental shift that would be far more complex and potentially expensive. The Secretary is instructed to provide a report, consistent with the guidance outlined above, to the Committees on Appropriations of both Houses of Congress not less than 60 days prior to the implementation of any Departmental reorganization. The Secretary is further reminded of the reprogramming instructions set forth elsewhere in this bill for the purpose of any implementation stage of a proposed reorganization.

My interpretation: Vilsack--be very very careful about reorganizing.

Broccoli Production.—The Committee has been informed that the Department has dedicated funding toward spurring broccoli production in the eastern United States. The Committee is aware that that farmers have invested considerable amounts of time and private funding into research on soils, crop management practices, and new broccoli varieties to develop and maintain a successful broccoli production industry on the East Coast. The Committee directs the USDA to work to ensure that Departmental efforts do not compete with or detrimentally affect privately owned, family-farm business operations.

My interpretation: don't encourage new broccoli farmers because we want to protect the existing one.s

Those Inflexible Bureaucrats

In the hotel business. The NYTimes "Haggler" column covers consumer issues.  Today's is on the problem of hotels charging a "resort" [flat] fee not accounted for in the Priceline bid price.  Lots of resistance to revealing such fees up front--the column closes with this:

"“Most of the hotels charging resort fees have told us that, operationally, they can’t bundle the resort fee into the base rate and then guarantee us that their front desk personnel won’t go ahead and charge it again at the front desk,” he wrote in a follow-up"

When government bureaucrats are this inflexible, they get laughed at.

Exporting Timothy Hay

Via Tyler Cowen, here's a totally totally surprising article from the Seattle Times.

I never in a thousand lifetimes would have expected anyone in the US to make money by exporting timothy hay, but they do, it seems.  The hay on our farm was a mix: timothy, orchard grass, assorted vegetation.  It was not great hay, to say the least.  Apparently this outfit in Washington has great land and can make great timothy hay, hay which looks great, because that seems to be the major criterion for the Japanese who are the leading importers.

The secret is the hay is fed to racehorses (originally here in the US, now in several countries).  So the hay is not important for its nutritional value, it's important for its looks, so the trainer can assure the owner that the horse is only eating the very best, the best because it's greenest.  Given the uncertainty involved in racing, it's like the superstitions ballplayers have, something which gives emotional reassurance to all concerned.

Surprising Factoid of the Day

According to Elixir,A History of Water and Humankind, by Brian Fagan, it took a long while for Europeans  to figure out that the rain and snow accounted for the water in the rivers.  He gives da Vinci credit for first seeing that, but it wasn't confirmed until the 17th century.

On Cross Training and a Mea Culpa

Readers of this blog need to remember I'm a geezer, subject to memory lapses ( and fits of insanity). Today my routine has been disrupted by a routine dental appointment, so I finally remembered to check my comments on this blog.

There's one comment from June I'd like to respond to via a post. The original post suggested cross-training NRCS and FSA employees (I should have included RD when collocated).  The commenter responded that having soil scientists and engineers fill out paperwork is a really good idea (he/she was being sarcastic, I suspect). 

I think I can probably expand my commenter's position.  He/she would say: "Look, NRCS spends its money on technical expertise.  The agency does its work in the field, not pushing paperwork.  Cross train your FSA people in pushing paper all you want, but having trained engineers do paperwork is a waste of government money.  Further, to the extent NRCS pushes paperwork, it's not really NRCS, it's the local soil and water conservation district (i.e., money provided from state funding) employees who do the pushing. "

Let me defend my suggestion, at length:

First, "cross training" does not necessarily mean cross operations.  I don't know what sort of training either FSA or NRCS gives these days to new employees.  At one time FSA had an extensive course for new county executive directors, plus courses for "clerks" as they used to be called.  And new DC employees had a 1 or 2 week course covering what each office in the agency did. I think a couple weeks covering what the sister agencies do would be worthwhile.  At the very least, it might cut the prejudice each agency has towards the other: FSA is just a bunch of paper pushers; NRCS is just a bunch of cowboys who ride around in their pickups, when they aren't cooping. (That's my exaggerated summary of how some employees in the one agency view the other. )  By giving each other an appreciation of the work the agencies do, maybe it might remind the bureaucrats their purpose is neither to push paper nor do soil science, but to help farmers efficiently.  And it opens the way for new ideas.



Second, some numbers.  Senate Appropriations Committee passed the ag appropriations bill for 2012 today.  According to this summary of the contents, NRCS salary and expenses were cut by $43 million, FSA by $28 million, and the farm loan program by $57 million.  Basic political realities say the service center agencies are going to continue to decline in the number of employees, not only FY 2012 but 2013 and beyond.  That says to me the bureaucracies need to be open to new ways of operating.  (I assume that states, which are equally under financial pressure, are also cutting support for S&CDistricts.) So considering cross operations should be on the table.

Third, somewhere today (Post, Times, online, I forget) there was an article about how a doctor heading a medical practice office (maybe 20 people or so) had reorganized to cut his overhead.  The basis was cross training support personnel and rethinking the way they ran the office.  Part of it, I strongly suspect, was personal.  The doctor said he wanted to greet and work up his patient, rather than having a technician do it.  Part of it was organization and sharing duties.  For example, they mentioned having medical personnel who might not be busy making the reminder calls on appointments and having a job stack for support personnel. Implicitly they were implying that with specialist jobs, people sometimes sat around waiting for patients.  That says to me they had good software which could track the work flow so people could see what needed to be done, but I didn't notice that stressed.

Romney's Short-Sighted Cuts

I think all of the debt reduction proposals probably have a key flaw: they don't distinguish between revenue and expenditures.  What I mean: FSA spends money, IRS takes in money, as do some other government agencies.   It may be logical to apply an across-the-board cut  to the agencies which spend money; it is illogical to apply the same cut to those which take in money.  It's like a family whose wage earner(s) are paid by the hour deciding to economize by cutting everything by 10 percent, including cutting the hours spent working.

Insurance Subsidies: Flood Versus Crop

The Center for Public Integrity has this piece on flood insurance, saying the subsidy runs about 40-45 percent.

They also have an old piece on crop insurance, focusing on the revolving door between crop insurance and USDA.  They report this about Dallas Smith, who used to be a division director in FSA before jumping to the Department under Clinton.

His boss at the time, Smith, maintains that [Ken} Ackerman  [head of RMA] was not removed. Smith, who was then acting undersecretary of farm and foreign agricultural services, asserts that “Ken played an important role in the negotiations throughout. He oversaw the negotiating staff and presented the results of the negotiations to Congress and other oversight bodies.”
But despite Smith’s denials, Ackerman has stated that he was in fact removed as head of the negotiations. Moreover, Joseph Connor, a former analyst at the USDA’s Risk Management Agency, as well as current and former USDA employees, back Ackerman. They state that the real negotiating power was removed from him. And sources close to the USDA say that it was Dallas Smith who was directly responsible.

I'm not sure what the subsidy level for crop insurance is, but using EWG's figures for 1995-2010, it computes to 59 percent.

MIDAS: Remember Year Is Vital I

Coming back to the MIDAS strawman briefly, I just want to emphasize one thing I learned in the 1985-87 time period: the initial planning for the System/36 processes and data slighted the importance of the year.  It was easy to do: most interactions with a farmer at the county office you know which year you're dealing with--it's the current crop or program year.  And because it's just a matter of assumptions, it's a fact which often got lost in our modeling, planning, and system design.

Very briefly, it looks to me as if MIDAS might be making the same error.  I hope not. 

A Weak Obama--Blame the Goo-Goos

There's the perception of Obama as not being a strong leader.  It may be true, but thinking back and comparing him with past Presidents, one problem is that Presidents have lost power since the days of LBJ.

LBJ could arm twist and logroll like no one else we've had in my lifetime. But the Obama good government (goo-goos) regime of transparency and no earmarks limits the feasibility of that.  If I recall Arthur Schlesinger Jr wrote a book attacking the Imperial Presidency, by which he meant LBJ and Nixon, not JFK.  I've not studied the transcripts of LBJ's tapes while he was in the White House, but his "treatment" was legendary.

I can illustrate the sort of thing I mean: Sen. Shelby wants NASA to build rockets in his state.  Sen. Shelby also blocked a Nobelist from going on the Federal Reserve Board and is threatening to block the appointee for the Consumer Protection Board.  Under a President LBJ, there would be a commission appointed to review NASA operations with a view to consolidating them, with Huntsville a prime candidate for the chopping block.  Once Shelby caved, the commission would vanish, or issue a bland report.

But if Obama tried that, all the goo-goos (of which I am one) would be up in arms.

[Updated with link to Shelby article.]

Relying on SSA's Death Master File

This Project on Government Oversight post reports SSA's OIG finds significant problems in the Death Master File, so SSA continues to make payments to dead people.  This is important, because FSA and other government payers rely on hitting the Death Master File to check on payee eligibility. [Updated link] 

The Gnomes of Zurich

This post at Calculated Risk suggests, to me, the gnomes of Zurich are back.  It's a question of which way they jump: help the EU or not.

MIDAS Strawman

I wonder what NASCOE's members thought of the MIDAS strawman (actually "limited preview") at their recent convention. 

I call it "strawman" because it reminded me of the Infoshare strawman Greg Montgomery created back in 1991.  He had a indexing software package which could do hyperlinks as we know them now--remember 1991 was before the advent of World Wide Web browsers. Tim Berners-Lee put the first website up about a month before Greg did his stuff. Anyhow, while Greg couldn't do WYSIWYG interfaces, he was able to model a lot of ASCS operations running on a PC.   Of course, Infoshare, like other similar efforts since, turned out to be a dead end. 

My first reactions to watching a couple of the MIDAS demos is:

• I like the software which was used to create the demo.
• Most of my reactions to the actual FSA software being demoed is probably personal feelings along the lines of NIH. 
• The one really big (as Ed Sullivan used to say) thing I'd raise is: where is the ability for FSA field personnel to discuss and provide feedback?  They can and will point out the problems in what's being developed, and you need that input as early as possible. 

I'll probably have more reaction later if my energy and interest holds up and I don't get distracted.

10 Years Later

Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton have been making the rounds pointing out the failures to implement some of the recommendations of the 9/11 commission:

• biometric checking of visitors leaving the US
• standardized identification
• realignment of Congressional committees
• no standard intercommunication for first responders
• no civil liberties board

The Problems of Top Down Thinking

Some of the security on the Internet is based on "certificates"; different authorities provide trusted certificates to say that A is really A (i.e., http://google.com is really Google).  ComputerWorld has a piece on some hackers who got into a Dutch authority and got the certificates for the CIA and Mossad.  It's a reminder of potential problems in designed and centralized systems: the more security is concentrated in one place, the greater the rewards for a successful hack job.  If I never provide my credit card number on line, it's never at risk.  If I provide it to Amazon, along with 100,000,000 other people, the rewards to a hacker of getting into Amazon's charge card database are enormous.

Buried in this post at edge.org (hat tip Marginal Revolution) is a similar consideration of "smart cars"--the idea is that once all our cars are smart, they can operate much more efficiently than today.  But, as the writer observes, it also means the rare accident could be horrendous.  (Just as railroads increased the possible top-end death toll from one accident by orders of magnitude over stagecoaches.)

Back To School in France and Britain

Dirk Beauregarde comments on how big an occasion back to school day is in France.  Everyone goes back on the same day, the media reports on the day, and the minister of education will speak.  Towards the end he writes:

"in the UK, this was the first day back at the new "Free Schools" - which seen from this side of the Channel appear to be no more than a chance for any nutter to open his or her on school , - I might be a critic of French education, but I'm glad it is a fully comprehensive, state controlled system."

 Sounds as if the charter school movement has reached Britain. 

Why Borrowing Is Not Costless

My contrarian side is active this morning--Brad DeLong and other liberals are arguing for major investments in infrastructure today because we need them and the real cost of borrowing (i.e., Treasury interest rate minus inflation) is zero.

Or maybe it's the bureaucrat in me: the nitty gritty is, if we borrow money today at an effective rate of zero, what is the term for which we're borrowing it? Say 10 years.  So the logic is, we can borrow now and pay back in 10 years and the money didn't cost anything.  However, the bureaucrat says: you're committing to either raising taxes and/or getting enough gain in GDP from the investment for which you're borrowing to be able to pay it back in 10 years.  Otherwise, you're committing yourself to rolling over the debt 10 years from now, at possibly a higher rate of interest.

So my bottom line is: the liberals are spinning. IMHO it's not pure spin.  I can agree that improving our transportation infrastructure would be a productive use of money.  And if you don't fix it now, you're going to spend more down the line and probably face higher borrowing costs to boot.  So overall I think the argument for more infrastructure spending today is valid; it's just the idea of costless borrowing seems to me to be spin.

Friedman Scorned in France

Some conservatives blame Milton Friedman for the rise of big government, given his work in developing the income tax withholding system as a bureaucrat during WWII.  So it's a little surprising to read in Dirk Beauregarde's post,the French, those effete socialist-loving big government types, don't have withholding:

"We don’t have « pay as you earn » in France. The majority of French people pay their tax bills in three seperate installments – February, May and September. The last one is the hardest, because you’ve just blown all your money on the family holiday."

"A Precious Snowflake"?

That's David Roberts describing the sort of liberals who believe in climate change.  He says: "Everyone has their own perfect pony policy solution and disdains all others....You need a left that is greater than the sum of its siloed constituent parts, so that climate is no longer the sole province of “the environmental movement,” gender equality no longer the sole province of “feminism,” worker welfare no longer the sole province of “labor,” etc.—some good old-fashioned solidarity. The left used to have some of that. Why doesn’t it any more? Why does the left seem so much less than the sum of its parts these days?"

His answer: the left used to rely on unions and the liberal mainstream churches, both of which are now shadows of their former selves, and nothing has risen to replace them. 

That rings true enough to me.  I remember Walter Reuther, head of UAW, being big in civil rights issues.  I remember the World Council of Churches, the epitome of establishment religion, also being big in civil rights.  The League of Women Voters was big in political reform, attacking the urban bosses, who were also big, at least through the 1960's.  There aren't those kinds of mass organizations left, just on the right where you have particularly the religious organizations.

Where Do Americans Live

Via Marginal Revolution, here's a map displaying where Americans live, and all those hyphenated Americans: German Americans, African Americans, etc.  It's based on 2000 Census data and people's self-reported ancestry.  The color coding reflects the ethnicity with the largest number reporting in a county. 

Pondering the logic of the respondents is frustrating: I can understand people saying "American" when their ancestors came over 200 years ago, except of course for African Americans who've been here equally as long. But why is so much of the country coded for German-Americans--were the counties so mixed that a 10 percent response was the largest? . The part of the country coded "American" is basically the Scots-Irish area of the country, the Appalachians and the South. Whether or not there was a category for Scots-Irish in the 2000 Census I don't know. I wonder what a similar map for earlier censuses would have shown. 

The map reminds us of our diversity: counties with French, Japanese, Dutch, Finnish, Norwegian pluralities.

12 Percent of Emergency Response Officials Are Idiots

That's my take from this sentence, from a Government Executive post addressing the use of emergency response grants in the wake of 9/11:

And a newly released survey found that a whopping 88 percent of emergency-response officials believe that grants are allocated according to what's best for politicians, not what's best for emergency preparedness.

Perhaps I should be charitable and say 12 percent have a surplus of charity and a deficiency of cynicism.

Conservation Compliance in the New Farm Bill

Chris Clayton has a discussion of farm groups, particularly the Iowa Farm Bureau, and their approach to the new farm bill.  Whether or not to make eligibility for crop insurance dependent on "conservation compliance" is a key issue, which Chris offers thoughts on.  He links to a Des Moines Register blog/report.

Apparently the Iowa FB President wanted the linkage, which presumably would help the passage of the overall bill, but his convention ultimately refused to go along.  The last paragraph of the Register post reads:

"But the delegates clearly were in a mood to revert back to the Farm Bureau’s longstanding opposition to government  involvement in day-to-day agriculture. Earlier in the morning they passed a resolution that would forbid state and federal government agencies from accepting anonymous complaints against individual farmers, and also limit the amount of government reports that could be posted on the internet.

 I'm sorry they feel that way, but as taxpayer I want any reports of possible violation of federal and state law investigated based on the merits, not tossed out because the complainant is anonymous.  That goes whether it's a complaint against a federal bureaucrat or any one else.  I also want more transparency, rather than less.

Kids and Nutritious School Lunches

Petula Dvorack has a column in today's Post on the problems of feeding kids nutritious school lunches.

Bottom line: it's very very difficult.

The Suicide Belt Sounds Like Minutemen to Me

From Freakonomics on suicide(suicide is twice as common as homicide):

The American suicide belt is comprised of about ten western states, this sort of wide longitudinal swath running from Idaho and Montana down to Arizona and New Mexico. … So, yes the inner mountain west is a place that is disproportionately populated by middle-aged and aging white men, single, unattached, often unemployed with access to guns.

Remember the Minutemen from the 1990's?  It seemed as if a high proportion felt they were mistreated by FmHA/FSA.

Closing Post Offices

By chance I grew up in a place which used to have a post office. It was a "fourth class post office".  You've never heard of such a thing?  They used to have them back in the late 1800's, but it was closed before the turn of the century. So instead we were served by a rural delivery route out of a post office 3 miles away, in the same small town which housed the central school.  "Central" because it represented the results of consolidating a bunch of one-room school houses into one school system.

My point is simply that the consolidation and centralization of facilities and infrastructure is not a new thing.  See this Rural Blog post on the current go-round.

Have Rice Growers Capitulated on Direct Payments

I noted the change of position on the part of the cotton growers here supporting a revamped crop insurance program over direct payments.

Al Cross also notes it here, calling it a seismic shift.  In the context of our 5.8 earthquake last week, I'd call it a 7.0 in the political landscape.  It shows how much impact the emphasis on cutting the 10-year deficit projections is having.  Just a year ago I'm sure I could have found many references to the idea that current programs were doing the job and the 2012 farm bill should just be a simple extension of the 2008 (which was mostly an extension of 2002, which was a modification of 1996...)

I checked the Rice Producers website, but no positions on farm bill that I saw.  I suspect they'll not fall into line.  The problem for them is: rice is irrigated, that cuts their production risk, so the major risk they have is market prices.  It will be hard to come up with crop insurance to cover that.  On the other hand, to the extent that my cynical mind suspects the cotton producers of waking up to the fact that payment limitation doesn't apply to crop insurance, maybe the rice producers will be swayed by the same consideration?

Foolish Question of the Day

Conor Friedersdorf asks:

Will listeners of Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, Lara Ingraham, and the many other conservative broadcasters who talked up O'Donnell, and impugned the character of her critics, hold them accountable?

To be fair, it's a totally rhetorical question, but I enjoyed his search of the archives.

New England Floods, Deju Vu All Over Again

For those of us who have graced this earth for long enough, lots of things ring our bell making echoes of the past.  That's true for the floods in Vermont and upstate New York, reminding me (after a little googling) of the hurricanes which hit Connecticut twice in 1955, followed by a heavy storm.  From a site on the subject:

On March 19, 1956, Governor Ribicoff made the following statement before the United States Senate Appropriations Committee listing "what the 1955 floods cost Connecticut:"

• "91 persons dead and 12 others missing and presumed dead.
• 86,000 persons unemployed.
• More than 1,100 families left homeless.
• Another 2,300 families were at least temporarily without shelter.
• Nearly 20,000 families suffered flood damage.
• Sixty-seven of our 169 towns were affected by the floods.
• The damage to individual property, to business, to industry, and to State and municipal facilities has been estimated at almost half a billion dollars."³

An Ode to Washington DC and Think Tanks

Justin Wolfers bids fond farewell to the Brookings Institution and Washington, DC.  It's a reminder of some of what goes on behind the scenes of public policy. 

Do Only Old Trees Fall in a Hurricane?

I used that generalization today in an chat, but I suspect I might be wrong. When old trees fall they damage things, when young trees fall they don't.  I say that because the tree that fell closest to our house (about .25 miles away) was about 5 inches in diameter.

Determining Disability: On Silos

I found this blog post at Pro Publica to parallel concerns about using the same acreage reporting process for both FSA and crop insurance.  The logic is the same: Social Security Administration has a process for determining whether someone is disabled; Education has a provision to forgive student loans for those who are disabled; why not piggy back the student loan forgiveness on the SSA process?  Sounds good, but as usual there are good bureaucratic reasons not to, at least according to Education.

I suspect the reality might be that Congress, the public, and the bureaucrats all are envisioning an over-simplified perfect world.  If someone looked at the situation worrying about margins of error and marginal returns on investments, the end result might well have been different.  But that's not how we usually look at things, much to the dismay of economists.

Funniest Sentence, and Truest, of the Day

" If I were President of the United States, my blog posts would read somewhat differently."  That's Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution at the end of a post on Monetary Policy with Excess Capacity (which I didn't devote the neurons to understanding.

Cotton Growers Throw in the Towel on Direct Payments?

Via today's Farm Policy, here's a press release from the National Cotton Council. I read it as conceding the end of direct payments and counter-cyclical payments in favor of this:

The revenue-based crop insurance safety net would be complemented by a modified marketing loan that is adjusted to satisfy the Brazil WTO case.

 Now a question for those working on MIDAS: how do you create software for this? My points, based on sad experience from the past;

• trying to do software in the midst of farm bill consideration and implementation is like trying to have a picnic during a hurricane: management's time and attention is concentrated on adapting to changed circumstances, and there's none left for those working on the project
• even if you can continue working on your project, the odds are great your end-product won't fit the new farm bill.  That's because no one in management (i.e., Congress, the President, or the Secretary) knows what the hell FSA operations will look like in the future.

Surprising Science Fact(?) of the Day

:Some of the scholarly literature suggests that the economic damage resulting from hurricanes is a function of wind speeds raised to the eighth power."

That's from Nathan Silver at the Times blogging about the media coverage of Hurricane Irene. 

On Adapting to the Weather on the Farm

We didn't grow corn in my time on the farm, which was long ago anyway, so his content is mostly a mystery to me, but John Phipps has an interesting post outlining 11 steps he and his son are taking to adapt their operation to changes in weather/climate.  I'm not sure they're not preparing to fight the last war; one of the things I think we know is that weather in the future will be as variable as in the past.  To me that means that adjusting farming operations is likely to pay off over the long haul, but not necessarily the short.   (As a side note, I saw somewhere that one place we got additional acreage from is by doublecropping; apparently in southern Illinois and other places it's now possible to follow wheat with short season corn.)

The 11 steps demonstrate clearly how much knowledge the modern farmer needs.  It's just a continuation of a long long trend, a trend which puts the small farmer and the older farmer at a competitive disadvantage.

The Learning Occupations: Farming

Jennifer Warthan at The Cotton Wife has a too-cute series of photos showing her son <5? imitating his father as he works on farm machinery. 

There are some occupations, farming and storekeeping for two, where the offspring can learn at the knees of their parents.  There must be some life lessons in such learning, I'm not sure what, but there must be.  Of course in the days of the one earner family and the stay at home homemaker, girls learned at the knees of their mothers, but we don't, or I don't at least, grow as sentimental over those life lessons.

On Over Estimating Gardening Interest

Here's an honest gardener at Treehugger: she realizes her eyes were bigger than her willpower, particularly in North Carolina heat.  One of the weaknesses of the locavore movement is this fact; short term enthusiasms erode under the day to day realities of work, drought, insects, flood, mistakes and entropy.

Excessive Incentives

Greg Mankiw links to a video by Jeff Miron, an economics professor at Harvard on 3 myths of capitalism.  His third myth is that capitalism caused the Great Recession: no, no, no--it wasn't capitalists, it was the excessive incentives from government policy. 

Now it seems to me that one argument for the Bush tax cuts, particularly on those with higher incomes, was to provide incentives to entrepreneurs.  So the lesson I take away from Prof. Miron is that we ought to allow them to expire immediately

The Illusion of Asymmetric Insight

The idea of this very long post is that we know we ourselves are full of mysteries, while we know we pretty well understand other people.  Rings true to me.  Apparently the blogger has a book coming out and is using the blog  to stir interest.  He succeeded with me.  An excerpt:

In a political debate you feel like the other side just doesn’t get your point of view, and if they could only see things with your clarity, they would understand and fall naturally in line with what you believe. They must not understand, because if they did they wouldn’t think the things they think. By contrast, you believe you totally get their point of view and you reject it. You see it in all its detail and understand it for what it is – stupid. You don’t need to hear them elaborate. So, each side believes they understand the other side better than the other side understands both their opponents and themselves.

The Bubble in Farmland Prices

Farmgate has an index of Illinois farmland prices here.  Here's the recent figures:

2001 123
2002 126
2003 131
2004 138
2005 173
2006 193
2007 216
2008 245
2009 244
2010 264
2011 307

As a comparison, my neighbors house sold for about $100K in 2000 and about $360K in 2006.  Bottom line: see the title of this post.