A slow post...  

Somehow, around two weeks ago, I strained? pulled? twisted? some thew or something in my left shoulder. Driving a tractor with all the controls on the right became a real hassle, and putting on my pants a challenge. Needless to say, posting one-handed wasn't fun either.

So I didn't.

But it's getting better in that casually glacial pace I now realize is how geezers heal.

So let's talk irrationality. It seems fitting just now when a new farm program is taking shape.

As many of you know I have been fascinated with efforts by cognitive psychologists to understand why we make irrational choices, indeed how we choose in the first place. A considerable body of research has piled up on the odd ways our mind works.

All of it is pretty damning when it comes to imagining our species as having anything at all in common with say, Vulcans. We are persuaded by the trivial, attention-grabbing, or emotional in the face of hard facts to the contrary.

In fact, it all seems pretty futile.

The last several years have seen many popular psychology books that touch on this line of research. There’s Ori and Rom Brafman’s Sway, Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational and, naturally, Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow. If you could sum up the popular literature on cognitive biases and our so-called irrationalities it would go something like this: we only require a small amount of information, often times a single factoid, to confidently form conclusions and generate new narratives to take on new, seemingly objective, but almost entirely subjective and inaccurate, worldviews.
The shortcomings of our rationality have been thoroughly exposed to the lay audience. But there’s a peculiar inconsistency about this trend. People seem to absorb these books uncritically, ironically falling prey to some of the very biases they should be on the lookout for: incomplete information and seductive stories. That is, when people learn about how we irrationally jump to conclusions they form new opinions about how the brain works from the little information they recently acquired. They jump to conclusions about how the brain jumps to conclusions and fit their newfound knowledge into a larger story that romantically and naively describes personal enlightenment.
Tyler Cowen made a similar point in a TED lecture a few months ago. He explained it this way:

There’s the Nudge book, the Sway book, the Blink book… [they are] all about the ways in which we screw up. And there are so many ways, but what I find interesting is that none of these books identify what, to me, is the single, central, most important way we screw up, and that is, we tell ourselves too many stories, or we are too easily seduced by stories. And why don’t these books tell us that? It’s because the books themselves are all about stories. The more of these books you read, you’re learning about some of your biases, but you’re making some of your other biases essentially worse. So the books themselves are part of your cognitive bias.

The crux of the problem, as Cowen points out, is that it’s nearly impossible to understand irrationalities without taking advantage of them. And, paradoxically, we rely on stories to understand why they can be harmful. [More]

Currently, I'm reading Jonathon Haidt's The Righteous Mind, which could be the best of the bunch. And despite the warnings voiced above, I think it has been remarkably helpful, especially in this election season.

But I agree about the "narrative bias". The reason farmers watch USFR is hear a story about the commodity markets that has all the elements of any good yarn. Good guys and bad guys, a range of motives, and nearly miraculous abilities to shape events.

Most of all it transforms a raft of transaction details (sales) into an living entity - The Market. This entity goes shopping for acres, gets confused, and tries to persuade farmers to do various things like hold crops or shift acres. It is this enduring fairy tale that takes a mess of dry data and turns it into something we think we understand. In reality it is little different from seeing a pony in the sky when looking at water vapor accumulations.

The bigger question is if we can or even should override this predilection to choose a narrative over say, a statistical summary. Currently, I still hold out hope we can, but it's so much hard work with often little reward, we don't.

Regardless, just knowing our thoughts are riddled with inconsistencies should enable us to proceed with more caution, especially when demanding we know The Truth.

Much like my tax return...  

 The math for budget-cutting is tricky.  I have been studying the Romney/Ryan hybrid proposal and agree with most econobloggers who are not sure where he can find the loopholes/deductions to pay for his tax breaks.

The first thing to note is that there are clearly enough tax expenditures to finance the $900 billion cost that the Tax Policy Center reckons Mr Romney’s plan will cost (relative to current law). But as you dig into the list, problems arise. First, these expenditures would be worth a lot loss once Mr Romney has cut income tax rates (see my caveat below). Second, Mr Romney has put several off limits, most notably the preferential rate on dividends and capital gains (worth $91.3 billion) and the ability of corporations to defer tax on foreign income ($19.6 billion), since under his plan corporations would not owe taxes on such income. Third, several will presumably be off limits: is he really going to tax Medicare benefits ($79.3 billion) or eliminate the earned income credit ($58.5 billion)?

But the biggest problem is one not obvious from the table: the distribution of these breaks. Yes, they disproportionately benefit the upper 20% of households because their tax rates are higher. Nonetheless, as this Tax Policy Center paper notes, roughly a third went to the bottom 80% of households (especially tax credits and above-the-line deductions). Since Mr Romney has said he would spare the middle class, most of this money would be off the table. Where it gets really interesting is inside the top 20%. Many deductions are in effect capped. As a result, their biggest beneficiaries are not the top 1% but the next 19%, with one exception: the preferential rate on capital gains and dividends, more than half of whose benefits go to the 1%. By eliminating tax expenditures for upper income families except the preferential rate on capital gains and dividends, Mr Romney’s plan would be a gigantic transfer from the upper middle class to the rich. And keep in mind that the upper middle class is also the group likely to pay most under any reform to Social Security and Medicare. 

Mr Romney’s team defends the feasibility of his plan by noting its similarity to the Bowles-Simpson commission proposal, which like Mr Romney lowers the top rate to 28% and pays for it by closing loopholes. But the comparison does not actually help Mr Romney’s case. First, unlike Mr Romney, Bowles-Simpson eliminates the preferential rate for capital gains and dividends. That is both a significant revenue-raiser and the principal reason the truly wealthy suffer most under their plan: the top 1% sees its after-tax income fall 7.8% and shoulder half the net increase in taxes. Under any plausible version of Mr Romney’s, the after-tax income of this group would rise. Second, it only lowers the corporate rate to 28% instead of Mr Romney’s 25% (from 35%). Third, Bowles-Simpson clearly hurts the middle class; the middle 60% of households see their after-tax income drop about 1.5% each. The reason is that the plan nukes almost all deductions, and replaces only a few with miserly tax credits that are worth less than the current deduction to most taxpayers. If Mr Romney wants to spare the middle class he will have to be much more generous than Bowles-Simpson when it comes to protecting their tax breaks. And there’s the rub: Mr Romney can be revenue neutral or he can spare the middle class but I don't see how he can do both. [More]

From the table above - which has been widely accepted as an accurate account of what tax expenditures cost, farmers should note certain items.

1. Exclusion of capital gains at death: This "step-up in basis" is a BIG deal - perhaps more important than the actual rate itself. It also looks to be one with a smaller consituency to fight for it. I think it is greatly at risk.
2. Capital gains: As discussed in the above article, the fact this is largely helpful to the 1% and few others makes it a tempting target. Again it's a big deal for farmers selling land after the recent runup.
3. Elimination of deduction for health insurance: Depending on the outcome for Obamacare, this could tempt many employers to drop group insurance for simple compensation. At the very least, it will undoubtedly push more of the cost to employees, although that is happening already.
4. Mortgage interest: I think this applies to homes (reported on Schedule A) - not interest reported on Schedule F, but it's the same 1099, so I could be wrong. [Update: probably not at risk unless a desire to include real estate investors in the revenue makes it a target]
5. 401K benefits: Not sure how many farmers do this when buying land has trounced these as retirement piggy-banks, but some did.

While it's hard to imagine enough Congresshumans anxious to attack these popular "loopholes", you can't get done what Romney has proposed without hitting many of them. So the bottom line is worrying about the Farm Bill is peanuts compared to the budget debate for my farm.

Prediction: tax cuts might happen, but eliminating enough tax breaks won't. 

Just stumbled across this...  

I'm not a fan of soppy stories, but I admired Caine's ingenuity.

Let's form a club...  

I have somehow neglected to get a tattoo. I'm not alone.

But the new extreme inking is by no means confined to the sporting set. Everywhere I look in Florida, I clock old geezers with hammocks and the word “Margaritaville” emblazoned across their burly sun-blasted torsos. Chicks, too: Today I saw a superannuated South Beach swinger boasting a tarantula on her right shoulder. Every time she hoisted her sippy cup to her lips the spider jiggled. And it’s no longer just a class thingy: I even saw tats at the legendarily WASP-y Bath and Tennis Club in Palm Beach. OK, so they were on the leg of the car-park valet, but just you wait. Next year, the old broads in the canasta salon will be sporting radical ink. Mark my words.

In the past there was one reason, and one reason only, to ink up: A tattoo confirmed your status as a scary outsider rebel carny outlaw sociopath. “Don’t mess with me because I am insane,” was the intended message. And it worked. Remember Robert Mitchum in Night of The Hunter? When he cuts Shelley Winters’ throat we are hardly surprised: We knew trouble was on the horizon as soon as we saw the words LOVE and HATE inked across his knuckles. Tattoos meant mayhem.

Cut to today: Having a tattoo has lost its original meaning. Having a tattoo now has no meaning. Having a tattoo means that you have a tattoo. [More]

I prefer to think of it as "like-new" condition.

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On a totally unrelated note: Anybody need a automatic talc dispenser? It is similarly new-in-box, and too big for our embarrassingly small model of seed tender. Will autograph. Make an offer.

Still sunk after all these years...  

What is it about the Titanic?  I mean, it's not like Spock died.

I wasn’t the only one who was obsessed—or writing. It may not be true that “the three most written-about subjects of all time are Jesus, the Civil War, and the Titanic,” as one historian has put it, but it’s not much of an exaggeration. Since the early morning of April 15, 1912, when the great liner went to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, taking with it five grand pianos, eight thousand dinner forks, an automobile, a fifty-line telephone switchboard, twenty-nine boilers, a jewelled copy of “The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam,” and more than fifteen hundred lives, the writing hasn’t stopped. First, there were the headlines, which even today can produce an awful thrill. “ALL SAVED FROM TITANIC AFTER COLLISION,” the New York Evening Sun crowed less than twenty-four hours after the sinking. A day later, brute fact had replaced wishful conjecture: “TITANIC SINKS, 1500 DIE.” Then there were the early survivor narratives—a genre that has by now grown to include a book by the descendants of a Lebanese passenger whose trek to America had begun on a camel caravan. There were the poems. For a while, there was such a glut that the Times was moved to print a warning: “To write about the Titanic a poem worth printing requires that the author should have something more than paper, pencil, and a strong feeling that the disaster was a terrible one.” Since then, there have been histories, academic studies, polemics by enthusiasts, and novels, numbering in the hundreds. There’s even a “Titanic for Dummies.” This centennial month alone will see the publication of nearly three dozen titles. [More]

Junkbox, Episode VRIDRI...  

Stuff I saw this week that made me say "huh":

• Russian agriculture update 
• The roads may not be getting better soon
• The wind bloweth where it listeth... (Thanks, Tom)
• Why I'm not going public
• Bailouts? They were investments that are paying off.
• The last word on French women

I think our corn will survive the 25℉ nights last week.

An economy of debt...  

I have been struggling to get my mind around the working of the shadow banking system. 

It's not easy for me.

The shadow banking system is the collection of financial entities, infrastructure and practices which support financial transactions that occur beyond the reach of existing state sanctioned monitoring and regulation. It includes entities such as hedge funds, money market funds and structured investment vehicles. Investment banks may conduct much of their business in the shadow banking system (SBS), but they are not SBS institutions themselves.
The core activities of investment banks are subject to regulation and monitoring by central banks and other government institutions - but it has been common practice for investment banks to conduct many of their transactions in ways that don't show up on their conventional balance sheet accounting and so are not visible to regulators or unsophisticated investors.^[1] For example, prior to the financial crisis, investment banks financed mortgages through off-balance sheet securitizations and hedged risk through off-balance sheet credit default swaps.^[1]
The volume of transactions in the shadow banking system grew dramatically after the year 2000. By late 2007 the size of the SBS in the U.S. exceeded $10 trillion. By late 2009 the United States SBS had shrunk to under $6 trillion due to increased regulation, changes in business practice, and pressure from investors who in some cases no longer wanted their funds to be used in the shadow banking system. Globally, a study of the 11 largest national shadow banking systems found that they totalled to $50,000bn in 2007, fell to $47,000bn in 2008 but by late 2011 had climbed to $51,000bn, just over its estimated size before the crisis. Overall, the world wide SBS totalled to about $60 trillion as of late 2011.  [More] 

These complex, interwoven financial contracts are essentially a function of debt of various kinds - mortgages, bonds, commercial paper, and other assorted and newly arrived instruments. As the shadow banking system grows relative the the regular banking system, (avoiding regulation and offering bigger profits) demand for debt grows.



The idea of demand for debt is exactly the opposite of what most of us are conditioned to expect. Our moralistic teachings from the Depression Generation has left us confused about how debt could have any redeeming aspects whatsoever.


But the effect of what happens in the SBS immediately is felt in the money supply which in turn impacts economic growth in a big way.

The blurring, or even absence, of the line between fiscal policy and monetary policy in the shadow banking system is often ignored.
It’s no longer enough to understand traditional monetary policy transmission mechanisms (money multipliers, federal funds rates, reserves); it is also necessary to understand how the shadow banking system (collateral supply, rehypothecation) affects monetary policy, and vice versa.
And this also seems like the source of the many challenges in working out how to regulate the sector.
Because one thing that’s clear from the note is that the shadow banking system represents a lot of money, and more specifically a lot of credit flowing through the economy. Regulating it won’t be as easy as saying bring it all on balance sheet or higher capital standards (though the latter is probably still a good thing).
How to define, for instance, the appropriate coordination between the central bank and fiscal policymakers when the outstanding Treasury stock affects monetary policy in this way? Or how to go about discovering the right balance between government readiness to respond (as it did in this case) vs the moral hazard it would bring?

… and summary from Credit Suisse:

Crucially, this chart and the shadow money perspective allows one to see that there has been
(1) a huge and necessary change in the composition of the effective money stock,
(2) a big reduction in the velocity of circulation of liquid collateral,
(3) a sharp reduction in the value of illiquid collateral (houses),
(4) an increase in the “haircuts” on illiquid collateral (higher LTV ratios), and
(5) a big increase in the precautionary demand for money by both firms and households.
The net result cannot be reasonably characterized as posing a major inflationary threat – at least until such time as financial system deleveraging is more complete, collateral values, especially house prices have recovered substantially, and overall private sector credit demand is growing strongly…
The public sector is still doing King Collateral’s work. How long it acts as Regent may be the central question for financial markets in the next decade.

[More]

This is pretty obscure I know. But when we argue about the size of our federal debt, it is a powerful complicating factor.  The SBS needs an immense supply of US Treasury securities, regardless of whether we think it is a good idea or not to run deficits. This is one reason why despite now-decade long predictions of interest rate increases, it hasn't happened, and doesn't appear likely in the near future.


In order for the massive financial sector which has grown to about 1/3 of our economy - and its outsized rewards to those employed there - to continue, a steady supply of debt/currency is needed to substantiate deals as acceptable collateral. 


Our financial system has evolved from supplying limited capital to enormous demand for investment loans, to chasing limited investment opportunities with wads of cleverly contrived debt-based capital.


I don't see - nor do any economists I read - any way to reverse this trend. The investments the world needs are to a significant degree public investments - infrastructure is a great example - and the political winds are blowing us away from those ideas. Absent massive government spending on roads, schools, locks and dams, etc. we only have industrial production to fund. That's not enough to absorb both public (like China) and private pools of capital.


As a result the financial sector makes money by betting on itself. This produces little other than big winners and losers, and frantic action, to my eye. To make it more complex, it will take us a long time, I think to grasp the idea of a world where free capital is plentiful and places to put it or not.


Strangely enough, we have been in a similar position before: the Middle Ages, after the Great Plague.
Demand had collapsed and the tiny number of nobles with money had nearly zero investment choices. This is one of the reasons they chose to plow money into their afterlife by building cathedrals - it was simply one thing to do with their accumulating wealth.


It is almost impossible for many of us to comprehend debt as an asset, but it has to be for the counterparty, by any accounting system. The stronger we make our guarantees for both public and private debt the more we enable the SBS to spin off derivatives of them to trade in various manners. Aided by new technologies that slice time into tiny segments to extract value, the possibilities seem nearly endless, but I can envision an upper bound to this profit source, as it simply becomes more common.


The demand for high-quality debt, however, may never abate. In other words, it may be a long time before interest rates reach anything like what many of us consider normal.  Bad news for savers and investors, good news for those who can deploy capital profitably.

Since "summer" is here...  

We've opened our pool (three weeks earlier than ever) due to nasties growing in the warming water. Danged if it might not be briskly tolerable by Easter! (We don't heat it).

So this timely PSA:

Drowning, it turns out, does not look like drowning. It often looks like nothing at all. From your point of view at the pool side, in the cabana, at the beach, or on the boat, drowning simply looks like this: The person simply isn't there any more because they quietly slipped to the bottom of the water after quietly struggling mostly out of your sight.

The new captain jumped from the deck, fully dressed, and sprinted through the water. A former lifeguard, he kept his eyes on his victim as he headed straight for the couple swimming between their anchored sportfisher and the beach. "I think he thinks you're drowning," the husband said to his wife. They had been splashing each other and she had screamed but now they were just standing, neck-deep on the sand bar. "We're fine, what is he doing?" she asked, a little annoyed. "We're fine!" the husband yelled, waving him off, but his captain kept swimming hard. "Move!" he barked as he sprinted between the stunned owners. Directly behind them, not ten feet away, their nine-year-old daughter was drowning. Safely above the surface in the arms of the captain, she burst into tears, "Daddy!" How did this captain know - from fifty feet away - what the father couldn't recognize from just ten?...

Read that here.
Drowning is the second most common cause of accidental death among children. Between 500 and 1000 Americans under the age of 15 will drown this year, about half of them within 25 feet of an adult who does not see it happening, and in about one in ten cases the parent will be watching as it happens, watching the kid drown, not realizing what they are seeing. [More]

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On a hilarious note you'll all enjoy, seconds after I hit the "submit" button for my taxes, I noticed Jan's 1099 for Social Security I had failed to include. Since it was her first year, TurboxTax didn't prompt me to add it. Well, it probably did, but I forget how really, really old she is. 

Filing an amended return is a hassle, BTW.

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Missed another rain. Planters are stopped.

I'm calling it the "Dozen Drought*". 

*(2012 - get it? I kill me!)

This is why...  

I am a leetle bit worried about drought...

At the end of February, this is our soil moisture anomaly (divergence from average)

 

And here we are today

 

 

[Source]

Coming out of spring with depleted reserves makes every summer day like August.

My weird reason...  

For worrying about a serious upper Midwest drought: I'm going with my gut.

Lookit, I ridiculed Pres. Bush for his "gut" statements, and while still doubtful he was using the best methodology, it now seems likely, that for some complex situations, feelings can help us make decisions.

Here’s where emotions come in handy. Every feeling is like a summary of data, a quick encapsulation of all the information processing that we don’t have access to. (As Pham puts it, emotions are like a “privileged window” into the subterranean mind.) When it comes to making predictions about complex events, this extra information is often essential. It represents the difference between an informed guess and random chance.
How might this work in everyday life? Let’s say, for example, that you’re given lots of information about how twenty different stocks have performed over a period of time. (The various share prices are displayed on a ticker tape at the bottom of a television screen, just as they appear on CNBC.) You’ll soon discover that you have difficulty remembering all the financial data. If somebody asks you which stocks performed the best, you’ll probably be unable to give a good answer. You can’t process all the information. However, if you’re asked which stocks trigger the best feelings – your emotions are now being quizzed – you will suddenly be able to identify the best stocks. According to Tilmann Betsch, the psychologist who performed this clever little experiment, your feelings will “reveal a remarkable degree of sensitivity” to the actual performance of all of the different securities. The investments that rose in value will be associated with the most positive emotions, while the shares that went down in value will trigger a vague sense of unease.
But this doesn’t meant we can simply rely on every fleeting whim. The subjects had to absorb all that ticker-tape data, just as Pham’s volunteers seemed to only benefit from the emotional oracle effect when they had some knowledge of the subject. If they weren’t following college football, then their feelings weren’t helpful predictors of the BCS championship game.
The larger lesson, then, is that our emotions are neither stupid nor omniscient. They are imperfect oracles. Nevertheless, a strong emotion is a reminder that, even when we think we know nothing, our brain knows something. That’s what the feeling is trying to tell us. [Please read the whole post - it's not long]

This whole production season has creeped me out. From too little precip for too long to too high temps too early, my feelings of concern about the growing season are...well, growing. While I have some semi-rational justifications, such as the deepening soil moisture deficit and increased likelihood of warm temperatures due to latent environmental heat now stored in the ground and water, I also realize long-range forecasts really can't be counted on.

So we're giving a little more credence to our uneasiness with assuming weather will return to normal. In fact, judging by some conversations at a wedding last night, there will be more bean acres in Central IL than were planned just last week. Too-dry-to-plant-chiseled-stalk-fields are going to beans.

It's just a feeling, but Jonah suggests it meets the criteria for when feelings should not be totally discounted.

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On another topic, a request has poured in for planting pictures from our farm. This is my famous "Clod Cam": planting as seen by a clod in the field on the marker track. Note the dust.



These were taken last Thursday 3/29. We were trying to get a new(to us) 1770 JD planter, a new Case 315 tractor, and a new Precision Planting System all started. As I shared on USFR, it was the worst First Day in my career.

After 3 days, Aaron finally deduced we had double intermittent failures: a shaft speed sensor and planter drive motor controller. The odds of that happening are astronomical. I should have bought a lottery ticket.

After replacing both, the headache finally ended.

This looks potentially troublesome...  

The newly announced possible link between corn insecticide treatments and bees is a cause for concern.

In Thursday’s issue of the journal Science, two teams of researchers published studies suggesting that low levels of a common pesticide can have significant effects on bee colonies. One experiment, conducted by French researchers, indicates that the chemicals fog honeybee brains, making it harder for them to find their way home. The other study, by scientists in Britain, suggests that they keep bumblebees from supplying their hives with enough food to produce new queens.

The authors of both studies contend that their results raise serious questions about the use of the pesticides, known as neonicotinoids. [More]

The reason I am going to watch this is the possible mechanism by which this occurs - a catalytic effect on fungicides given to the bees for other reasons.

Both Goulson and Mace Vaughn, pollinator program director at the Xerces Society, an invertebrate conservation group, said neonicotinoids won’t be the only cause of colony collapse disorder.
“If it was as simple as that, the answer would have been discovered a long time ago,” said Goulson. “I’m sure it’s a combination of things. I’m sure that disease is a part of it, and maybe the two interact.” He noted a study in which honeybees exposed to neonicotinoids were especially vulnerable to a common bee parasite. Another study found that neonicotinoids dramatically increase the toxicity of fungicides. [More]

That's the kind of complicated chain of events that has made the search for a cause of CCD so difficult. For that reason alone it strikes me as plausible.

Coupling that with issue with the planter-talc problem recently suggested, and you have the beginning of a complex theory of cause and delivery.

*****

 FWIW, we're planting. Central IL has made the drought map, as we have known for months now, and I worry about moisture levels dropping in worked ground faster than new roots can chase them. Also, we're running out of days for a frost, albeit historically, it could still happen, I know. There is no hint on any longer range forecast, however.


If the year turns out to be hot, I'd just as soon be pollinating in June. Soil temps at 4" are an astounding 68℉. If it weren't for the calendar, anyone would swear it was past time to plant.


With all those rationalizations, were going to put it in the ground. The idea of a significant Aug/Sep premium due to short supplies certainly seems possible after yesterday, too. If the season turns out to be great growing conditions, it might be the high for the crop.

Good listens...  

Haven't done this is a while, but I can vouch for and highly recommend the following Great Courses (which you can download as a podcast for planting season)

• Before 1776: The American Colonies:  Great info, good delivery, incredible voice.
• The American Revolution: all the war stuff, very little politics, superb delivery (although he gets a little weird with ll the "87th Foot, 79th Dragoons" detail) This guy loved this war!
• WW I: The Great War: Simply great. For Americans who have forgotten how this war shaped Europe, and why it was a really different war for Poland, Latvia, etc. Wonderful mix of detail and overview.
• The History of England from the Tudors to the Stuarts: This was one of my favorites, and I now have about 6 dozen places I want to see in Merry Ol'.

Also I'm working on Lost Christianities: Christian Scripture and the Battles over Authentication. This is deeply troubling information delivered clearly by an authoritative biblical scholar. It makes you think about why and what you believe. 

The unexpected president, ctd...  

I'll let Josh Barro, whose conservative credentials are impeccable, say what I have struggled to comprehend about race and the right and this campaign:

There has been a clear strategic calculation here among Republican elites. Better to leverage or at least accept the racism of much of the Republican base than try to clean it up. I remember a moment in the 2008 campaign where John McCain argued with a voter who said that Obama was “an Arab.” This time around, either the candidates don’t care about standing up to racial misconceptions or have decided they can’t afford to.
And on a more substantive policy issue, you have Gingrich’s rejection of the idea that there is even a racial matter to discuss in the Martin case. You don’t have to assume that George Zimmerman is guilty of murder (Julian Sanchez has a good piece on this) to recognize that Trayvon Martin would likely to be alive today if he were white.
The question of what to do about that is complicated, but it’s clearly a public policy concern. Instead, Gingrich commits an error that is common on the Right—jumping from the fact that race relations have improved to a claim that black Americans no longer have special policy concerns worth discussing.
It’s disgraceful that Gingrich would call bringing up Trayvon Martin’s race disgraceful. It also undermines everything else that conservatives say about race, no matter how valid. How are Republicans supposed to be taken seriously when they say they understand black Americans’ policy needs when Newt Gingrich is spouting nonsense like this?
My challenge to conservatives who feel they get a bum rap on race is this. Stand up for yourself and your colleagues when you feel that a criticism is unfair. At the same time, criticize other conservatives who say racist things, cynically tolerate racism in the Republican base, or deny the mere existence of racial issues in America today. The conservative movement desperately needs self-policing on racial issues, if it ever hopes to have credibility on them. [More worth reading]

And at that, I'll let go of this thread.

The president, ctd...  

Thanks for the great comments. I'll respond in this separate post, as linking is a bear in the comments.

First:

"From VA":
1. For most objectors I know, it is more about the appropriate role and size of government. Not withstanding the many previous encroachments, if Obamacare stands, there is nothing in my life that the feds cannot dictate. The concept of limited government is gone completely and many of us find this a travesty.

2, Your own source says "The number of significant federal rules, defined as those costing more than $100 million, has gone up under Obama, with 129 approved so far, compared with 90 for Bush, 115 for President Bill Clinton and 127 for the first President Bush over the same period in their first terms." This is more than a 40% increase in the most burdensome regulations. Also, for aggies, think GIPSA, dust, child labor, and TMDL. I very definite pattern of increasing regulation impacting agriculture.

3. I have witnessed this administration "vetting" of very routine, perfunctory, commodity board appointments where they have indeed used Chicago tactics, and have confronted the most minor appointee with their record of campaign contributions.

4.I agree, no jamming.

5. I think it is not Obama as a person many aggies find repugnant, but it is his view of government and his belief that government always knows best that most of us reject.

Okay, in similar order:

1. Your objection to the mandate as THE line in the governmental size stand is typical.  It has been nicknamed the "broccoli argument"  as it requires an affirmative commercial action. There are two answers to this. First, we said the same thing about Kelo and imminent domain. I thought that was dumb decision as it trampled private property rights, but so far we haven't seen cities, etc. seizing land will-nilly. Second,

 The law’s critics, for instance, do not challenge rulings like Wickard vs. Filburn, which allowed Congress to forbid a farmer from growing his own wheat that he did not plan to sell. Of course, growing wheat for personal consumption is an elemental act of human civilization, a definitive act of a person who wishes to provide for himself and be left alone. Not coincidentally, some of history’s most monstrous tyrannies denied individuals the right to grow their own food unmolested – think of Stalin’s Russia, inducing a famine among the productive farmers of the Ukraine, who were forbidden from using their own time to grow their own food.

Indeed, if we imagine a reverse situation – in which conservatives were conceding the government the right to regulate “inactivity” but not “activity” – their hyperventilations over the perilous state of freedom in America would be more persuasive. The line between the laws legitimized by Wickard and real communist tyranny is actually quite thin. Instead they have managed to whip themselves into a frenzy by painting fantastical, concocted stories about the government forcing people to eat broccoli – as if they truly cannot imagine a legal or philosophical principle that would allow the government to enforce a health care mandate (that conservatives invented!) and not allow the government to force-feed broccoli to its population. [More]

2. Note the source (thanks for reading the link, BTW) does not compute any benefits, only costs. What does preventing another well blow-out count? The EPA and other regulators tackled some hard problems like finance reform that have already cost us billions. We can complain regulations cost us but as ethanol supporters like to shout, "Look at all the benefits!"  Regardless, I simply disagree with the perception there has been a "tsunami" of regulation. More, perhaps, but it is a matter of degree.
3. I think those type of tactics are now pretty standard across both parties, Look at how slow the Senate has been to confirm appointees.
4. N/A
5. I'm glad you are on a different e-mail spam list than me, VA. You might visit ag talk blogs or listen to Rush. I appreciate your objection is based on policy, but after three years of bad jokes when with other farmers, my opinion is as I stated.

But a truly insightful comment with which I agree followed (albeit mislocated):

Ed Arndt Rich. Co ND said...
John,

On Obama. I didn't vote for Obama but was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. I had hoped he would stop the shredding of the constitution started by George W. Bush with the Patriot Act. However,under Obama and his attorney general Eric Holder, the process has been accelerated. Under sections 1021 and 1022 of the National Defense Authorization Act the government can indefinitely detain terrorist suspects. The suspect has no right or opportunity to defend himself or make an attempt to refute the governments action. Are we to believe the government will never make a mistake? Think about that for a bit.

Now consider this. On Mar. 5th, in a speech at Northwestern University, Attorney General Eric Holder made the astounding statement (astounding to me at least)that the constitution guarantees due process of law, but it does not guarantee judicial process. For all of my adult life I had always believed that due process of law included a public trial before judge and jury. Not according to Holder. Under Holder's version due process becomes whatever the government says it is, not open to public or even congressional scrutiny. Holder's remarks were referring to the killing of Anwar al Awliki by drone strike, and various arguments can be made in defense of this action. However, the precedents set by Holder's speech are terrifying. How long until some other branch of government decides that it is not obligated to provide judicial process and instead provides whatever due process the government decides will suffice? Under this scenario, what we have commonly held to be constitutional guarantees become null and void.

These things have not been much reported in the mainstream media. Why? Is the media keeping it a secret? Or does the media think(I fear correctly) that the public is not interested?

You can google "Eric Holder's speech at Northwestern University" for background on this subject.

I was irate when habeus corpus was decimated under Bush, and am dumbfounded that Obama has doubled down on this insidious attack on personal liberty. What is more profoundly troubling is this is still not invasive enough for the Republican party excepting the sane voice of Ron Paul. They are cheering him [Obama] on!

This matter is far and away more devastating to me than Obamacare, but that is the issue that the public wants to debate. In fact, the public seems OK with killing suspected terrorists, even if they are American citizens, under the thinking I guess it wouldn't happen to someone named Phipps, of course.

Until you are targeted by the president to be killed (as just a suspect), I suppose.

The president we didn't expect...  

Obamacare (and yes, I guess that's what it will be called) has truly brought to light the myriad complaints of the right with his presidency. The comment below on a previous posts is helpful for my arguments about why these strong reactions exist.

 John, We sent them to Washington to repeal Obamacare and the massive Administrative regulations he put into effect day 1 along with being sickened by the Chicago tatics that HE brought to Wasington. I remember the "read it later" bills HE jamed thru w/o the "compromise" HE now wants. We are and will continue to pay for OBAMAS rotten leadership. He was the mistake.

Let me unpack this as evenly as I can, because "anon" shares a viewpoint I have heard frequently at farmer gatherings and in other conversations.

1. Repealing Obamacare: This remains the largest objection for most, I believe, yet it is rooted in remarkable confusion about what it does. Aside from the mandate, most of the major provisions - covering children until 26, guaranteed coverage, community rating, closing the "donut hole", comparison shopping, etc. - enjoy widespread popularity. The mandate itself will be very popular among health insurers should the law be upheld as it is one of the best ways to make make the other provisions affordable. The idea Obamacare is a government takeover is also unsupported by facts. It relies on private insurance but regulates how it will be packaged and sold. To the disappointment of many, there is no public option, which most associate with government intrusion.
2. There were no massive regulations passed on Day 1. At least, I can't find any. This is hyperbole that now passes for evidence. In fact, there is evidence the Obama administration is not keeping up with the regulations added by other administrations.   
3. Chicago tactics. Rep. Darrel Issa was widely expected to investigate every move by the White House to prove corruption, etc. He has struggled to make any news. Compared to previous administrations, this one does not stand out as remarkably worse, could even be rated better. There is no smoking gun despite unprecedented efforts by opponents. 
4. "Jamming through" legislation: I assume this means Obamacare, since it passed by one vote. First, this accusation is unfounded in reality. No president jams through legislation. Congress writes legislation in consultation with the White House, but even with a veto threat, the bills are Congressional products. If it passes by one vote in either house it is not jammed through - it is sent to the President like any other law. Many bills pass by the narrowest of margins. We call them laws. If the commenter refers to the party line nature of recent votes, I wonder if he/she would agree that no bill should pass without a vote from the other side, and propose an amendment to that effect. The 60-vote threshold (3/5) in the Senate is so hard to reach, it is very common for this to occur. As for pressure from leadership, this is normal practice and was used for Medicare D, the Iraq War, and other contentious bills like farm bills.
5. Finally, the tone of the comment, the capitalization of "HE", the argument by assertion rather than by fact or reason makes my point, I would suggest. It is Obama many despise, not his actions which have been surprisingly centrist.


Finally, it is no longer impossible to ignore the racist overtones in the opposition to Obama. It's out there. It is my belief that our nation was simply caught off-guard by a young, black President. He was not supposed to get the nomination and not supposed to be able to be elected, so when he arrived we had not prepared for the change.


For many it is a change too far. The second black President will be no big deal, but with the First, just like women at the Naval Academy, or Jackie Robinson, or countless other "firsts", we usually outlive the reaction. We don't adjust in real time or change many initial responses.


The commenter captures this "change weariness". As someone once remarked about globalization, "I don't have anything against it - it's just gone on too damn fast and too damn hard for too damn long". There is seldom a smooth pace to cultural shifts, but trying to pass off personalized animosity as well-reasoned policy arguments isn't working that well.

Graph of the Day...  

We've got the room.

 [More]

Tea regret...  

I have been mildly amazed at the anti-government ferocity in rural America, even while we were cashing many forms of government checks. I still think the majority of the virulent anti-Obama hatred (and that is a reluctant assessment) arises from who he is rather than his policies.

In fact, anyone could have seen how this would play out. With the Ryan budget, it has suddenly become undeniable.

It must have been a lot of fun to show up at meetings in the summer of 2010 and bash your sitting congressman or senator. No one knows how many video clips were shot of Tea Party members shouting down members of the U.S. House and Senate, some of whom had put their careers on the line for farmers.

Now the chickens are coming home to roost, so to speak, and, for the first time in decades farmers are faced with the very real possibility of not having a new farm bill or much chance of an extension of the current legislation when the 2008 law expires later this year.

By now, most of you have seen reports of the new federal budget proposed by Wisconsin Republican Paul Ryan, chairman of the House Budget Committee. The proposal would cut $33 billion from federal farm programs or about $10 billion more than the House and Senate Agriculture Committees proposed last fall.

Unlike previous years, this time the House of Representatives is filled with freshman members who have little or no sense of the purpose of farm programs or the stability they provide to agriculture. All most of them know is they think they have a mandate to cut federal spending. [More]

The curious thing for me is I am not alarmed by budget cuts to ag, so don't have a dog in this hunt, so to speak. But the Ryan budget is rapidly becoming the Republican budget, and as he is forced to fill in details, you can hear the gasps.

Of course, it is impossible to know what tax expenditures Ryan plans to eliminate; we can only guess. But it is worth knowing that just the top 6 tax expenditures account for more than half of the dollar cost of all tax expenditures. These include the exclusion for health insurance and the deduction for mortgage interest. Among those not in the top 6 are the deduction for charitable contributions and the deduction for state and local taxes.

In other words, it will be impossible to achieve Ryan’s revenue target without pretty much wiping the slate clean of every tax preference except for a handful of the most popular ones. This may be worth doing, but will be very difficult. The Tax Reform Act of 1986 reduced tax expenditures by about 2.7 of GDP, according to the TPC. If it could be duplicated, that would only get Ryan to his absolute minimum level of revenues as a share of GDP. Getting to the upper end of his target range would require a tax reform one third larger.

In short, looking only at the tax side of Ryan’s plan, he is anticipating enactment of an extraordinarily ambitious tax reform on top of the most ambitious budget cutting effort ever enacted. He would sharply cut outlays for every major program except Social Security and national defense. Every governmental function one can think of would be virtually abolished except for Medicare, Social Security and defense. A key reason for the severity of these cuts, of course, is that Ryan would cut taxes at the same time he is cutting spending. To achieve balance with lower than projected revenues requires even larger cuts in spending. [More]

The harsh rhetoric of the last 3 years hasn't left the majority of farmers much room to maneuver on policy. These are THEIR representatives, whom they sent to Washington to mandate concealed carry, shut down the Fed, obstruct any compromise, and spot Muslims under every bush. And they may be about to send some more.

What did they expect?

There is some parallel here with raising pit bulls, but I won't go there.

Google to the rescue...  

This is about the tenth time this has happened in the last few years. I need a unique, particular device, tool or part, and after checking local sources, professionals, and dealers, I draw a blank.

The problem was attaching our JD 1770 planter to a Case MX315 tractor. We needed all 5 hydraulic outlets (including the mysterious "Power Beyond" set). Only they weren't regular 1/2", #8 BOSS O-ring tips. Cobbling NPT adapters and ORB fittings only slowed the leak to a dribble.

In desperation I googled "hydraulic hose fittings" and arrived promptly here: discounthydraulichose.com

The name alone made me laugh - how typical is that for the Internet age! But not only did they have exactly what I needed, but it was about half the price I could find comparable fittings - even after rush delivery.

This is what I mean by the oncoming productivity that will be boosting our bottom line via the "Borg Effect".  (I have trademarked that, BTW). This is the effortless ability to connect to information and resources that Aaron will use as second nature, and I am continually and happily surprised by.

From bizarre fasteners to appliance parts to unimagined services, my farm is much closer to the hub of the universe than ever before. In fact, we are slowly erasing all the social and cultural penalties for rural living.

Now if we can just get a rural water district...

Junkbox, Episode ILLINOT...  

Things are not going well in the Land of Lincoln

• We can't operate a land grant university
• We can't play college sports competitively
• We don't seem to grasp public finance
• We are missing needed rains
• Our one political moment in the sun was wiped out like an, ummm...

Multiple issues here on the farm, including working to get a rural water district started, speeches. field work, and the now-incredible complexity of hooking a green planter with a red tractor and third-party electronics. No excuse, but posting came in last.

The kids are home...  

Apparently to stay. Young people are not moving around much.

In the most startling behavioral change among young people since James Dean and Marlon Brando started mumbling, an increasing number of teenagers are not even bothering to get their driver’s licenses. Back in the early 1980s, 80 percent of 18-year-olds proudly strutted out of the D.M.V. with newly minted licenses, according to a study by researchers at the University of Michigan’s Transportation Research Institute. By 2008 — even before the Great Recession — that number had dropped to 65 percent. Though it’s easy to blame the high cost of cars or gasoline, Comerica Bank’s Automobile Affordability Index shows that it takes fewer weeks of work income to buy a car today than in the early 1980s, and inflation-adjusted gasoline prices didn’t get out of line until a few years ago.

Perhaps young people are too happy at home checking Facebook. In a study of 15 countries, Michael Sivak, a professor at the University of Michigan’s Transportation Research Institute (who also contributed to the D.M.V. research), found that when young people spent more time on the Internet, they delayed getting their driver’s licenses. “More time on Facebook probably means less time on the road,” he said. That may mean safer roads, but it also means a bumpier, less vibrant economy.

All this turns American history on its head. We are a nation of movers and shakers. Pilgrims leapt onto leaky boats to get here. The Lost Generation chased Hemingway and Gertrude Stein to Paris. The Greatest Generation signed up to ship out to fight Nazis in Germany or the Japanese imperial forces in the Pacific. The ’60s kids joined the Peace Corps.

But Generation Y has become Generation Why Bother. The Great Recession and the still weak economy make the trend toward risk aversion worse. Children raised during recessions ultimately take fewer risks with their investments and their jobs. Even when the recession passes, they don’t strive as hard to find new jobs, and they hang on to lousy jobs longer. Research by the economist Lisa B. Kahn of the Yale School of Management shows that those who graduated from college during a poor economy experienced a relative wage loss even 15 years after entering the work force.

Perhaps more worrisome, kids who grow up during tough economic times also tend to believe that luck plays a bigger role in their success, which breeds complacency. “Young people raised during recessions end up less entrepreneurial and less willing to leave home because they believe that luck counts more than effort,” said Paola Giuliano, an economist at U.C.L.A.’s Anderson School of Management. A bad economy can boost a person’s weighting of luck by 20 percent, Ms. Giuliano found.

Notice how popular the word “random” has become among young people. A Disney TV show called “So Random!” has ranked first in the ratings among tweens. The word has morphed from a precise statistical term to an all-purpose phrase that stresses the illogic and coincidence of life. Unfortunately, societies that emphasize luck over logic are not likely to thrive. [More]

I'm not sure this is as big of a problem as the writer asserts, but it does bear contemplating.  If there is some cause-effect factor with the Internet, faster service and better gadgets will accelerate this trend. 

Regardless this does shed some light on the gasoline consumption drop, for one thing. It could be younger people will form a less intense consumer group, preferring experiences to stuff. 

Whatever the reason, the cultural impact will be considerable as Boomers loudly leave the stage.