Took me a while but after seeing Alec Tabarrok suggest buying coal mines and discussion on twitter of paying coal miners, I realized there's precedent--we bought out tobacco farmers, or rather their tobacco quotas, back when the FSA tobacco program was eliminated.
See this ERS page.
This twitter thread notes the outstanding performance of Puerto Rico in getting their people vaccinated--better performance than any state. It attributes their high rate to the fact their parties all support vaccination--there's no Dem-Rep split.
The pandemic has been a shock to many systems, institutions, and habits; some good and some bad. I think one good one is reducing the friction in social participation.
[For example, take a home owners association (HOA). After I moved to Reston I was automatically a member of the Pinecrest HOA. As such for some years I participated in the annual meetings, but my enthusiasm waned as my guilt about letting others shoulder the responsibilities for the cluster increased. So I don't think I've been in an annual meeting this century, much less the monthly board meetings.
But with the advent of covid the board meetings converted to Zoom. That by itself wasn't sufficient to get me to log in, but a renovation of a sidewalk by our house raised an issue sufficient to get me over the hurdle, to learn Zoom well enough to [what's the term for attending a Zoom meeting?]. I noted this week there were 11 attending, 4 board members and 6 residents, plus the maintenance rep.
I don't know that I will continue my attendance, but I think Zoom and the stimulus of the pandemic likely has permanently increased the interest and attendance at the meetings. It makes sense: you no longer have to venture out of the house and join strangers, make small talk, etc. Instead you just fire up the laptop or cellphone while sitting in your easy chair, and you have easy control over the degree to which you participate. It's great for introverts, who must be a sizeable part of the population.
Lots of attention being devoted to the state of our democracy and the nation Poor, declining and heading to possible civil war seem to be common analyses.
I'm reading the new Jonathan Alter bio of Jimmy Carter, who cites the opinion of a British visitor in 1971. At that time, with the Vietnam war going and racial problems stark and the boomer generation not trusting anyone over 30, the outlook seemed grim. I remember it well.
NYTimes reports on the Paycheck Protection Program, which it seems black business owners were more likely to get loans from online lenders than local banks. Although there's been publicity and concern about artificial intelligence algorithms being biased, apparently in these cases they may be less biased than the banks. (The bias in algorithms would result from training the AI app using data which was produced by biased non-AI systems, like training an app to assess beauty by using pictures of whites.)
While the report described by the Times is on black businesses, it easily relates to black farmers, including som issues which I may have touched on in the past. Back in the dark ages of the New Deal the precursors of the Farmers Home Administration were authorized to fill a financing gap, to provide loans to farmers who were credit-worthy but had been unable to get loans from local banks. Even before then the Farm Credit system was set up in the Wilson administration for the same purpose.
The Congressional Research Service has an overview of the farm credit situation.
As a liberal and retired bureaucrat I support government programs.
But I need to recognize their downside, which relates to the "last mile". When a government sets up a program, it needs to make a connection with the customer/client/citizen who will benefit or whose conduct will be regulated. I've written before about our problems with making that connection. But I've been writing from a government-centric viewpoint, saying that for example the Treasury has a hard time getting funds to support renters and prevent evictions out.
What about the perspecitve from the "man on the street", as we used to say? There's many problems--off the top of my head some are:
New York City is going to phase out its schools for gifted and talented students. That stimulates discussion on social media, discussion which is largely among the educated classes who might lean Democratic.
It strikes me as an instance where the elite discussion unconsciously disses rural areas. In such areas the schools are smaller and the opportunity to do enhance instruction for gifted and talented students is constrained. So to rural ears the discussion seems tone-deaf and irrelevant.
I gather from this post in the FSA Facebook Group that the issue of complying with the federal vaccine mandate is controversial. I ran across a post somewhere today which indicated the actual process of implementing the mandate was going to take a while.
I wonder whether with the delta surge declining will the administration actually go through with it. It sounds as if even when implemented there would be a drawn-out process for penalizing anyone who didn't get vaccinated, so it may become a dead letter. We'll see. In the meantime there's a lot of angst out there, and it may be creating conflict in small offices where there's strongly held divergent opinions.
We who support the Biden's position need to remember the human costs of how it's implemented.
Volkh Conspiracy has a guest poster writing on the "nondelegation doctrine", the idea that Congress should grant power to the executive only with strict guidelines.
For anyone interested but too lazy to go to the Reason magaizine, here's my comment:
“Major policy decisions”? Do we know what that means? There’s a standard of economic impact of $100 million for regulations–but that’s been unchanged since it was first adopted in the 1970s in relation to inflation concerns, not policy.
Arguable the USDA/Trump decision to spend billions from the Commodity Credit Corporation was a major policy decision. But it wasn’t particularly controversial, because it was too esoteric and there were no significant opposing voices to make a fuss. https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2020/01/21/trump-tariff-aid-to-farmers-cost-more-than-us-nuclear-forces/?sh=4fe7a4966c50
I suspect the operational definition is an issue about which there’s a big fight between the parties and/or interest groups. I think the reality is such issues don’t get resolved in legislation, just kicked down the road to the faceless bureaucrats who can be blamed if they screw up and/or offend people.