But 'Twill Serve,'Twill Do...

Last week we offered a passing salute to the world's deepest largest hand-dug well.* It's at Greensburg, Kansas.  Evidently a tornado  blew through town a few years ago and knocked down almost everything above ground but the well is, as they say, still standing.  My friend Steve says there's a gift shop.


They could twin  with wherever-it-is in Tajikistan that boasts the world's tallest flagpole.  Tajikistan is also the poorest country in the former Soviet union; perhaps the one most addicted to the opium (trade; not consumption); and the most dependent in the world on foreign remittances. (link).   Greensburg ranks a thriving 129th (out of 632) in Kansas per capita income.   The county collected $35.5 million in wheat subsidies in the 15 years up to 2010, though I'm betting most of those checks go to drop boxes in San Francisco.  Or the Cayman Islands.

No, 'tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a
church-door; but 'tis enough,'twill serve.

--

*Except it isn't.  Link.

Where the Doctors Are

Today's chart porn: cool interactive map of where the doctors are.    Doesn't tell you much you wouldn't have guessed but it does provide dramatic evidence of one of my favorite points.  Specifically, that a genuine wasteland is the swath of round down through western Nebraska and Kansas and environs.  No surprise that there are so few doctors in that part of the world; the amazing part is that there are any people.

If memory serves, western Kansas and Nebraska also rank at or near the top of farm subsidy recipients.  But I believe the checks go mostly to places where the drinks have little umbrellas.

H/T Ezra Klein.  For ag subsidies, ,the go-to source is Mark Perry.

Oh, and speaking of ag subsidies, go here.

Klein Goes Easy on the Secretary

Ezra Klein said something nice about city folk; agriculture secretary Tom Vilsack took offense.   Ezra gave him a dialogue in rebuttal, which is interesting but I think Ezra let him off way too easy.   Shorter Vilsack: farmers are "good and decent people"--thanks, we needed that. And, a new one on me: we need rural America because it is the generator of our military.   I think it is a spurious argument at best, but I strongly suspect he doesn't even have the right correlation.  Specifically, I suspect that the defining feature of whites in the military is that they're lineally Scots-Irish--a culture that has never met a weapon it didn't like.

The fact that many of them still live in a culture that can be described, however crudely, as "military" is more incident than cause [while I think of it, I wonder how much meth use correlates with "rural.'  My instinct is "quite a bit, but I'm not sure].

Meanwhile the Ag Department seems to continue about the business of delivering, protecting  and preserving farm "subsidies" for city folks who probably wouldn't recognize a farm except as seen from a low flying plane.

The Subsidy Lady

  As Steve Benen (channeling Politico) so ably pointed out yesterday, there is a glaring hole in the Republican phalanx against Federal spending.  You probably knew: it's farm subsidies, and no wonder: just as libertarian Rand Paul M.D. has shown not the slightest interest in cutting medicare payments, so the staunch defenders of budgetary rectitude apparently can't think of a penny that they would clip off this particular cash cow.  Back in the 60s, there were some tax-cutters in Congress who wanted to propose a cap on per-farmer subsidies of--I think maybe the number was $100k, still pretty serious bucks in that simpler time.  The whole point was to embarrass the sponsors into showing they were so in the tank for the farm lobby that the couldn't accept even a hint of compromise on the issue.  Of course these guys do not embarrass easily and the project languished.

If grudging fairness, I should acknowledge that some of the conservative think tanks have been pretty good on this one: see, e.g., link, link. (or were; both these links are going on four years old).   Maybe they understand it is all a charade.

Oddly enough, there does seem to be at least one Republican who appears willing to speak about farm subsidies.  I'm not sure whether this is serious, or a charade, or more evidence that she's batshit looney.  Do I dare suggest her name?   You'd think her enthusiasm might be at least tempered by the fact that she's apparently a pretty goodsized recipient of farm subsidies herself, but still.

The Mother of All Stimulus Programs

I suppose there is good news for a lot of people in that New York Times story about how a surge in exports is bouying American agriculture. The Times offers a full complement of feelgood data about how much this helps "the farm sector, which" as the Times says

accounts for a small fraction of the overall economy but has a strong impact on the well-being of many rural areas, and a ripple effect for suppliers and other related industries.

Kudos to the Times for also pointing out that the vast majority of this good news redounds to the benefit of a small minority of wealthy commercial farms, while the vaunted "small farmer" makes a good bit of his smaller income from nonfarm sources.

But I wonder--has anybody pencilled out just how much we're paying for this new wealth in the form of farm subsidies? Way I see it, the farm subsidy program is the mother of all stimulus programs--except that it goes back 20s, instead of just the last couple of years. Also, far as I can tell, one of the best arguments in favor of against (!) any stimulus program--puts too much money into the wrong hands, promotes inefficient uses of resources, the whole magilla. So while we are all jumping up and down and flailing our arms about the supposed bogosity of efforts to, e.g., throw a crumb to the mortgage debtors, wouldn't this be a good time to get the fat cats from the pasture (most of whom I suspect, live in the city anyway) off the dole?

Our Ancestors Took Down the Wooly Mammoth...

...now it's our turn (link):

JAKARTA (Reuters Life!) - A tiny Indonesian lizard has become big business for impoverished villagers in Indonesia, where growing Asian demand for reptile-based traditional medicines has driven a boom in gecko farming.

Comment: It's the gecko, the same as stars in those tiresome insurance commercials. The teaser paragraph quoted above says "farming," but from the story I surmise that we are still at the stage of capture & process. "Farming" would seem to be a normal next step; something to do with all those old ostrich ranches (just add water). I understand there's an order pending from three witches in Scotland.

H/t John, who has his eye out for government gecko subsidies in Kansas.

Wonder If She Ever Strangled a Chicken

Well, God Save Her! The Wichita bureau calls our attention to the fact that some €500,000 in farm subsidy payments last year went to (hats off) the Queen--Her Majesty, Elizabeth II, which ought to explain the gracious smirk smile on her face in the link from Bild.de.

It's nice to be able to put a face on this sort of thing. American farm subsidies, which almost certainly deserve their name as our most generous corporate welfare program, are far too often opaque, hidden behind the mind-numbing brand names of corporations or (ha!) cooperatives. Here, for example is EWG's list of top porkers for 2006; not a sentient human being among them. You can do a little better if you punch down to the local level. Here, for example is the list for San Francisco. It includes a few of what you might call "real people," but I wouldn't check for calluses.

Well, That's All Right, Then

Jeff Jacoby at Boston.com has figured out the subprime mortgage crisis: it's all Jimmy Carter's fault. Apparently Carter planted a little petard in the statute books back in 1977, which conveniently exploded just in time to embarrass the Bush II administration. How con-VEEN-ient. You can find details here.

His explanation of ethanol is a bit more plausible, but it's hardly a matter of (as Jacoby calls it) "unintended consequences." I think it has been pretty clear for quite a while that the dominant purpose of ethanol is to provide an occasion for farm-state Congressional looting.

Big Bucks in Farming

It may not be new news, but Carpe Diem highlights a great database on farm subsidies showing “fewer than 5% of congressional districts (19 out of 435 districts, or 4.35%) accounted for almost half (49.7%) of crop subsidy program spending in the U.S. between 2003 and 2005.” (link,; for the database, (link)).

He didn’t go into detail but it’s okay with me if he wants to get under the hood here and smoke out some particulars. For example, how many are Republican? Not all, surely but I bet quite a few. Just at a scan, I can see that the list includes the poster boy of libertarianism, Ron Paul (#39 with $262 million); also Former Speaker Denny Hastert (#45 with $212 million); and, okay to be fair, Palookaville’s own voice in Washington, Wally Herger (#25 with $340 million).

The champ? Oddly enough, it is not a Louisiana sugar plantation, but the Nebraska third district, the western two thirds of the state of Nebraska, which gobbled up $1.737 billion. Divided up among 51,702 recipients, that pencils out to an average of $33,595 each, but my guess is that the distribution is decidedly non-average.

The proud representative of these horny-handed sons of the soil is one Adrian Smith. Smith is a first-termer, boasts that in the state legislature he “quickly earned a reputation as a champion of conservative values ... [He] voted against tax increases, voted to protect the right of gun ownership, and maintained a strong pro-life record” (link).

Wiki says that “approximately one-third of the funding of his campaign came from the Club for Growth, an economic conservative group that supports tax cuts, limited government, school choice, and advocates eliminating all agricultural subsidies and the elimination of the US Department of Agriculture” (link). Wiki also says that it is “one of the most Republican districts in the nation”—Democrats came close to capturing it only twice (the most recent, when Smith won in 2006).

Update: I feel obscurely drawn back to this subject. Killing time, I've now perused the record for #2, Jerry Moran, Republican of Kansas. Turns out his district is in principle the same as Smith's--the vast western hinterland of his state. But Moran, unlike Smith, is fairly explicit that he's there to put his hand in the troughl (link):

In the house, Moran is a leading advocate for protecting and preserving the way of life in Kansas. … Moran focuses on legislation that will allow Kansas farmers and ranchers to remain viable.

Trans: Belly up, boys, party's on Uncle. In fact, Moran brings home $1.316 billion, for 75,802 recipients. That's 3.8 percent of the total, meaning that Smith and Moran between them knock back 8.8 percent of the grand total.

Update to Update: But wait folks, there's more. Here is Tom Latham, #3 (lin):

Since his very first day in Congress, Tom Latham has been dedicated to the ideals of change in Washington. His Iowa values and common sense are a testament to the work he strives to accomplish such as the promotion of individual liberty, economic opportunity, personal responsibility, and a smaller and smarter federal government.

Translated:$1.289 billion for 35,696 recipients; tht's 3.7 percent of the total and a running tab of 12.5%.