George Will:

In 2009, the net worth of households headed by adults ages 65 and older was a record 47 times that of households headed by adults under the age of 35 — a wealth gap that doubled just since 2005. The equalizing effects of redistributive transfer payments are less today than in 1979, when households in the lowest income quintile received 54 percent of such payments. In 2007, they received 36 percent.

It’s as though we have an intergenerational Treaty of Versailles, and the young are stuck with the war reparations. The problem is: there aren’t enough of the young to do so. Trouble ahead.

Robert Reich:

today’s tea party is less an ideological movement than the latest incarnation of an angry white minority — predominantly Southern, mainly rural, largely male — that has repeatedly attacked American democracy while trying to get its way. It’s no coincidence that the states responsible for putting the most tea party representatives in the House are the former members of the Confederacy. Others are from border states with significant Southern populations and Southern ties. This “no-compromise” right wing of today’s GOP isn’t much different from the evangelical social conservatives who began asserting themselves in the party during the 1990s and, before them, the “Willie Horton” conservatives of the 1980′s…America has had a long history of white Southerners who will stop at nothing to get their way: seceding from the Union in 1861, refusing to obey civil rights legislation in the 1960s

The worthies of the left actually believe this. It’s very peculiar after all this time that they continue to do so. The Telegraph attended one of the angry mob scenes. So did Glenn Reynolds. And of course there’s that noted Southern rural redneck Rick Santelli. And the “angry white men” that Reich imagines, um, they’re reportedly more than half women.

AP:

A federal judge on Friday barred the NYC’s Taxi and Limousine Commission from issuing permits for taxicabs…Judge George Daniels said in his written ruling that the commission can provide taxi medallions only for wheelchair-accessible vehicles until it produces a comprehensive plan to provide meaningful access to taxicab service for disabled passengers. He said such a plan must include targeted goals and standards and anticipated measurable results. “Meaningful access for the disabled to public transportation services is not a utopian goal or political promise, it is a basic civil right,” the judge wrote.

There are 1.7MM wheelchair users in the country, mostly located in the South and West, and mostly in rural areas. That’s about 0.006 of the population. We couldn’t find out how many are in NYC, even from disabled advocacy groups, so no doubt the number is even smaller than the 0.006 nationally. But it’s even worse than the AP story implies. WSJ:

about 2% of New York City’s roughly 13,000 yellow taxis have equipment that allows wheelchair users to get in and out. The Justice Department said the likelihood of a nondisabled person hailing a cab within 10 minutes is 87%, compared with just 3% for a disabled person.

All NYC buses are wheelchair-enabled, and so are 230 cabs (the MV-1 retails for about $40,000, weighs about 5,000 pounds and gets 13-15 miles per gallon). But waiting times are too long for a cab. So the legal machinery of the federal government spent millions of dollars to sue another government, both sides of which argument were taxpayer funded. If you think this is a good use of your taxes, well, good luck to you. HT: PW

Oliver Sarkozy on CNBC via zerohedge:

The math i’m working with is very simple. In the US banking sector, we had 3 trillion of wholesale funding that needed to be stabilized, got stabilized by the implementation of TARP which saw the US treasury buy $212 billion worth of preferred in the banking sector to stabilize that $3 trillion, give our banks the time to work through their problem assets.

In Europe, that $3 trillion is $30 trillion. so if you multiply the $212 by 10, you get the $2.12 trillion. In my view, the issues on the European banks are bigger than the issues on the books of the US Banks. So if you want to stabilize that $30 trillion and in my view it’s not that you want to, it’s that you have to, you do not have a choice, you’re going to have to be at least at 2.1 trillion and i suspect it may need to be more.

These numbers are disturbing, indeed, mind-boggling. First, let’s focus on sovereign debt matters. There’s a $1.4 trillion fund that’s been set up to deal with those issues, but it is not fully funded, and advisers to Angela Merkel have said that the real need is more like $3 trillion. But that’s not what Sarkozy is talking about — he’s talking about an additional $3 trillion in a Euro-TARP to bail out the banks. So we’re at $6 trillion and counting.

As for the bank bailout, Sarkozy said “if you want to stabilize that $30 trillion and in my view it’s not that you want to, it’s that you have to, you do not have a choice.” He’s right about that. There is no choice. There is no commerce possible in the world if banks are afraid to lend overnight money to each other — the $30 trillion is apparently interbank lending, guarantees, CDS’s, etc. (Hopefully he’s wrong about the $30 trillion number, but he’s a pretty knowledgeable fellow. If $30 trillion is the number, then major structural changes are needed so that this never happens again.)

We’ve already seen what the alternative to a bailout is, and it is unacceptable. The global flow of funds simply stopped after the US let Lehman Brothers cease operations on September 15, 2008. Having a non-functioning banking system is how a recession turns into a depression, and we’ve seen that play out before as well. So logic says that there will be bailouts of the magnitudes described above. We only have one question: where’s the money going to come from?

Oops, it’s not that darn cat. It’s those darn fat cats and VDH asks who they are:

Do they include the greedy doctors, who, the president once asserted, recklessly lop off limbs and yank tonsils for profits? Is my urologist a dreaded one-percenter? He found out what was causing my kidney stones but probably makes good money. Was a nearby farmer one, too? I bet he makes over $200,000 but, like many other growers in this area, has found a way to produce beef and cotton more cheaply…

was the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs a suspect billionaire? Should I be mad or grateful that he made billions by permanently replacing my old scissors, paste, and bottle of Liquid Paper of the 1970s?

Did Johnny Depp really have to earn $50 million last year alone — or Leonardo DiCaprio $77 million? Couldn’t they have settled for $2 million in salary in 2010, and thereby passed on a little bit of the savings to their ticket-buying fans? What kind of system would allow Oprah Winfrey or the late Michael Jackson each to accumulate nearly $1 billion? Is left-wing filmmaker Michael Moore — reportedly worth $50 million — a one-percenter? Why does such an enemy of capitalism need so much capitalist largesse?

Do this administration and its supporters really wish to separate millions of diverse Americans by a moral divide of the “few at the top”? Are liberals like Sens. John Kerry and Dianne Feinstein — among the richest in the U.S. Senate — in that elite group?

How about Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, together worth over $100 billion? They are certainly philanthropists. But their charities are predicated on two assumptions: They both apparently trust the private sector more than government to administer their vast estates, and neither sees much of a problem in avoiding billions in inheritance taxes that would one day be due to a now-broke federal treasury.

Is George Soros a “corporate-jet owner”? He nearly broke the Bank of England by shorting the British pound and was convicted in France of insider training. Rather than comply with new federal financial-disclosure regulations, he told some of his outside investors just to keep their money. Is Obama’s former director of the budget, Peter Orszag, a “fat-cat banker”? He left the administration to enter the “revolving door” of Wall Street, where he is now a rich banker for Citigroup.

There’s more than a little desperation in this pathetic approach to governance. The Hill: “The numbers say that voters don’t think he deserves reelection, he has no meaningful accomplishments, and the nation is headed off in the wrong direction under his watch. He is simply not viable by any measure.” Foolishness begets foolishness.

The Washington Post ran a long piece on Social Security, describing its problems in some detail. It could have trimmed the piece from its nearly 2400 words by using an appropriate shortcut:

Social Security, until now a huge lender to the government, will begin demanding repayment to its trust fund to cover the shortfall. If fully repaid, the trust fund can fully finance benefits until 2036…The $2.6 trillion Social Security trust fund will provide little relief. The government has borrowed every cent and now must raise taxes, cut spending or borrow more heavily from outside investors

So much for the “trust fund.” We suppose this article appears now to propagandize among seniors to join the administration and OWS and demand tax increases. We’ll know soon enough if that’s the case.

John Podhoretz is getting the vapors over the GOP field. Something similar seems to be going on over at Powerline. For some perspective, let’s flash back to January 2010 and the remarks of a retiring Democratic congressman from Arkansas:

Berry recounted meetings with White House officials, reminiscent of some during the Clinton days, where he and others urged them not to force Blue Dogs “off into that swamp” of supporting bills that would be unpopular with voters back home. “I’ve been doing that with this White House, and they just don’t seem to give it any credibility at all,” Berry said. “They just kept telling us how good it was going to be. The president himself, when that was brought up in one group, said, ‘Well, the big difference here and in ’94 was you’ve got me’.”

That didn’t work out so well, as you recall, with the 2010 D-to-R pickup far greater than the 54 seats in 1994, and Independents flipping by 33 points. Berry was prescient — one of the seats that flipped had been his.

The election is a year away. Republicans may blow it of course, but they’re not doing so now in our view. Indeed, there is a rather lively discussion taking place, with competing tax plans and so forth. Leading candidates have already said that (a) Social Security is a Ponzi scheme, and (b) global warming either doesn’t exist or isn’t very important — and the world hasn’t ended. Some observers are even having a little fun with the idea of a Cain/Romney ticket. Relax. There’s plenty of time to panic next year.

Solyndra on wheels? Clarice Feldman in AT:

Our tax dollars at work…a half-billion dollar loan (actually $529 million) from the U.S. Department of Energy to develop a hybrid toy for the wealthy and/or celebri-licious (like Leonardo DiCaprio, one of the first customers) that, in real world driving, won’t get much better mileage than your average crossover utility vehicle. Not only that, but the cars are manufactured in Finland — that’s right, Finland — and shipped here for sale, where their purchasers will then receive a $7,500 tax credit for buying one (the “cheap” base model starts at $96,895, with the full-zoot Eco Chic model going for a bargain $108,900).

The EPA issued its mileage report on this expensive bit of work: It gets 20 miles to the gallon, about the same mileage as those too frequently demonized domestic SUV’s. Even the Volt gets better performance. Half a billion blown. No Jobs. No environmental benefit. A special tax break to the rich, including De Caprio. Does the administration know where to invest our money or what? Al Gore and Colin Powell are on the wait list for the car.

Big deal. We wish people would quit whining. Sure, these things cost us a half a billion here and a half a billion there. But it’s just money after all.

Charles Krauthammer discusses the recent debate in the Washington Post:

Romney’s command was best seen in his takedown of Cain’s 9-9-9 plan. Cain refused to concede the burden to consumers of a national sales tax added on to existing state sales taxes. Doggedly sticking to his point long after it had been undermined, he kept raining down metaphors about apples and oranges. His national sales tax is a solution to a federal problem (a monstrous tax code), he insisted, and therefore irrelevant to any discussion of state sales taxes, which would exist regardless. It took Romney one sentence to expose the sophistry.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the Post: “The Club for Growth, a conservative anti-tax group, has praised Cain’s proposal as ‘both pro-growth and a good starting point on the way to a flat or fair tax’…Romney, in contrast, has proposed a 59-point economic plan.” Whatever you think of Cain, 9-9-9 is not sophistry, it is marketing.

Why it is the responsibility of the federal taxpayer to pay for the local police force in Flint, Michigan? These people are sounding a bit desperate these days, aren’t they? 383 more days of this transparent rubbish continues to be hard to imagine.

Art Laffer in the WSJ:

Cain’s now famous “9-9-9″ plan is his explicit proposal to right the wrongs of our federal tax code. He proposes a 9% flat-rate personal income tax with no deductions except for donations to charity; a 9% flat-rate tax on net business profits; and a new 9% national tax on retail sales.

Mr. Cain’s 9-9-9 plan was designed to be what economists call “static revenue neutral,” which means that if people didn’t change what they do under his plan, total tax revenues would be the same as they are under our current tax code. I believe his plan would indeed be static revenue neutral, and with the boost it would give to economic growth it would bring in even more revenue than expected.

In the recent past, federal tax revenues from the personal and business income taxes, all payroll taxes, and the capital gains, gift and estate taxes have averaged $2.3 trillion, while gross domestic product has averaged about $14.5 trillion. The total revenue from these taxes as a share of gross domestic product averages around 16%. Sometimes it’s a good deal higher, as in the boom of the late 1990s, and sometimes its lower, as in today’s “Great Recession.” But a number in the 16%-19% range is as good as you’ll get under our current tax code.

By contrast, the three tax bases for Mr. Cain’s 9-9-9 plan add up to about $33 trillion. But the plan exempts from any tax people below the poverty line. Using poverty tables, this exemption reduces each tax base by roughly $2.5 trillion. Thus, Mr. Cain’s 9-9-9 tax base for his business tax is $9.5 trillion, for his income tax $7.7 trillion, and for his sales tax $8.3 trillion. And there you have it! Three federal taxes at 9% that would raise roughly $2.3 trillion and replace the current income tax, corporate tax, payroll tax (employer and employee), capital gains tax and estate tax.

The whole purpose of a flat tax, à la 9-9-9, is to lower marginal tax rates and simplify the tax code. With lower marginal tax rates (and boy will marginal tax rates be lower with the 9-9-9 plan), both the demand for and the supply of labor and capital will increase. Output will soar, as will jobs. Tax revenues will also increase enormously—not because tax rates have increased, but because marginal tax rates have decreased.

By making the tax codes a lot simpler, we’d allow individuals and businesses to spend a lot less on maintaining tax records; filing taxes; hiring lawyers, accountants and tax-deferral experts; and lobbying Congress. As I wrote on this page earlier this year (“The 30-Cent Tax Premium,” April 18), for every dollar of business and personal income taxes paid, some 30 cents in out-of-pocket expenses also were paid to comply with the tax code. Under 9-9-9, these expenses would plummet without a penny being lost to the U.S. Treasury. It’s a win-win.

A static revenue-neutral tax change requires static winners and losers. And this 9-9-9 plan has made certain that even on static terms those below the poverty line will be better off—period. Once the dynamics take hold, many of those below the poverty line will find good jobs and thus will rise above the poverty line and start paying taxes. This is the type of tax increase I wholeheartedly support.

We don’t particularly care which of the leading contenders gets the GOP nomination. After all, look what he’s up against. But we think a few things are noteworthy about Mr. Cain: (a) he keeps getting written off by insiders although not a single primary has taken place and the Tea Party really likes him; (b) he has sparked some welcome and long overdue debate in the unlikeliest of places; and (c) whatever you think of 9-9-9 it is a marketing masterstroke — every presidential candidate on stage in the GOP debate was forced to focus on one man and an economic plan for America that came from a guy that no one had ever heard of 60 days ago.

Capital NY:

“A lot of us who normally would have been in this presidential race a long time ago, have been waiting for Christie to make a decision,” said Georgette Mosbacher, a Republican uber-fund-raiser and finance co-chair of the Republican National Committee who was among a group of Republican bundlers hoping to convince Christie to enter the race. “I think tomorrow, we’ll be contacting one another and probably put something together with Romney.”

“I’m going to go with Mitt Romney,” said John Catsimatidis, another donor who had been intrigued with Christie, in a brief phone interview this afternoon. “You’re calling about yesterday’s news,” said Catsimatidis, who said he had gotten the indication Christie wouldn’t run from some of the governor’s advisers yesterday.

Catsimatidis said he had started pitching Romney in the last couple weeks, on the expectation the governor wouldn’t seek the nomination. At a meeting with other conservatives last Monday night, Catsimatidis said, he made the pitch for Romney’s electability.

“The speech I gave to my conservative friends was, if you pick somebody who makes you 100 percent happy, you only get 47 percent against Obama,” said Catsimatidis. “We have to capture the middle in order to win and make a change in this country. Ninety percent of them stood up and said, ‘You’re right.’”

Well, some people with checkbooks have made up their minds. That settles that. Or does it? Real people presumably have a vote in the primaries and caucuses, and they seem to have other opinions so far, according to a CBS poll. We’ll take a wait-and-see approach in this most unusual of election cycles.

Final point: it was the energy of the Tea Party that powered the November 2010 landslide, and in that election Independents flipped by 33 points. The donors’ logic about moderates is flawed and out of step with where the nation is today.

Here are today’s emails:

John — We all have different reasons for getting involved in this campaign, and here’s one I’d like you to consider before tonight’s big fundraising deadline. People are counting on us. Winning this race means four more years to keep fighting for millions of Americans who need us to protect the progress we’ve already made. And it means we’ll be able to make a lot more. Can you pitch in before midnight tonight? All my best, Joe

John — We’re building something different here. Ours is the only major presidential campaign that outright rejects contributions from Washington lobbyists and refuses money from special-interest PACs. No matter what the deadline, no matter what the pressures or distractions, we’re always going to do this the right way: one person and one grassroots donation at a time. It’s the hard way to do it, but we’re stronger for it in the end. So please donate $3 or more before midnight tonight: Thank you, Barack P.S. — If you make a donation of any amount before midnight, you’ll be automatically entered for a chance to join me for dinner with three other supporters.

Maybe Warren Buffett, who apparently was for the Buffett rule before he was against it, can chip in the three bucks for dinner.

Katrina Trinko at NRO recorded that Cain speech in Florida that observers say put him over the top with his astonishing and decisive 37% win in the straw poll. It runs about 17 minutes and appears to be his stump speech. It seems pretty good to us as these things go, but we’re not convinced that it was “his power as an orator sealed the deal for hundreds of delegates.” Cain’s ideas are for the most part standard Tea Party fare, combined with a CEO’s perspective on leadership and decision making.

It seems to us that several things came together to deliver the surprising result in Florida. First, Governor Perry’s weakness as a debater was nothing compared to his gratuitous insult that many of his Tea Party supporters were heartless. These voters want nothing to do with Perry until he cleans up his act — they wanted a genuine Tea Party type and Cain seems to be that. Second, there is no mistaking that Cain has a plan, that he believes in his plan, and he speaks clearly about implementing his plan. But one thing that was different this week was Cain’s discussion in the debate of his bout with Stage 4 colon cancer. Surely some in the audience were unaware of this, and may now see him as more than just a successful guy fooling around in politics.

70% of the straw poll voters cast ballots against Romney and Perry. Whatever the ultimate outcome, it would be very amusing to see Mr. Cain serve as the tribune for Tea Party values and principles over the next period of time. Question: will the media (a) ignore him, or (b) ask every question and probe every weakness in contrast to their performance in 2007 and 2008?

Suitz Movie
by: dinocrat

We decided to make this movie (it took about 20 minutes to do so) after the previous week’s media stories about one potential Republican presidential candidate began to sound just like the dialogue in our little vignette. Imagine how much worse it’s going to get if Perry actually turns out to be the GOP candidate.

Employment growth in each Federal Reserve Bank district.

San Francisco is building a subway and it’s expensive:

the latest prediction is $1.6 billion, or nearly $100 million for each tenth of a mile…The subway misses connections with 25 of the 30 light-rail and bus lines that it crosses, and there’s no direct connection to the 104-mile Bay Area Rapid Transit line or to the ferry.

Commuters will have to travel eight stories underground to catch the train and walk nearly a quarter of a mile to connect to the Market Street light-rail lines — after riding the subway for only a half mile….taking the bus would be five to 10 minutes faster along every segment. The city’s metro system, which is already running $150 million operating deficits, isn’t likely to have the money to keep the subway running in any case…

Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood modified the grant criteria by adding environmental and communal benefits and minimizing cost-effectiveness. The change effectively means that any project can get federal funding as long as its sponsors claim they’re moving cars off the road. “Measuring only cost and how fast a project can move the most people the greatest distance simply misses the boat…people tell me they want better transportation in their communities. They want the opportunity to leave their cars behind…And to enjoy clean, green neighborhoods”

This is an excellent project. Not only is it just as slow as the train from Iowa City to Chicago, but it’s a lot more expensive. Our government is super-great!

Bloomberg:

The Obama administration outlined plans today to revamp government regulations that it said would save businesses about $10 billion over five years. The changes affect rules enforced by more than two dozen federal departments

That works out to each federal department saving businesses $83 million a year, if indeed the savings ever materialized. By contrast, the government borrows $188 million every hour of every day.

In much the same way as his colleague Richard Cohen, EJ Dionne spells out how easy it is for the government-centric culture of Washington to choose economic failure:

proposals to continue the payroll tax cut, extend unemployment insurance and enact patent reform are good, but not enough. The federal government needs to come to the aid of state and local governments again; the budget cuts they are being forced to make are precisely what the economy does not need now. We must find ways of boosting spending as quickly as possible on roads, bridges, transit and other building projects, including a new program to rehabilitate the nation’s dilapidated schools. And the administration needs to do far more to resolve the mortgage mess…

We need additional tax rates for the truly rich. A carbon tax, partly offset by tax cuts or rebates for middle income and poorer taxpayers, could provide additional revenue. And we need to do still more to contain health care costs without hurting those who can’t afford insurance, and without voucherizing Medicare. But our problems are not all made-in-America. This is a global problem requiring a global solution.

And a different perspective:

the White House reports that Obama is working on a new strategy for job creation that will be unveiled after he returns from vacation. The task of coming up with a jobs plan that works shouldn’t be all that terribly difficult. All Mr. Obama has to do is reverse what he’s done and change what he thinks.

First, by the government’s own numbers, small businesses have created 64 percent of the net new jobs in the U.S. economy over the past 15 years. In fact, that understates the role of small business, since the vast majority of America’s medium-sized and large businesses began as small businesses. The Heinz corporation began when 16-year-old Henry Heinz grated piles of horseradish at home, using his mother’s recipe, and sold the bottled product door-to-door in Sharpsburg out of a wheelbarrow.

Yet since Obama took office, employment at federal regulatory agencies has jumped 13 percent while private-sector jobs shrank by 5.6 percent. Second, 39 percent of small-business owners said in a Chamber of Commerce survey in July that ObamaCare was either their greatest or second-greatest obstacle to new hiring…

the Obama administration imposed new regulatory rules that will cost the private sector $40 billion. In July alone, reports Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., federal regulators imposed a total of 379 new rules that will add some $9.5 billion in new costs.

The solutions are so simple, but the kibitzers can’t see them, since they can’t imagine a world in which their ideas would be: (a) largely irrelevant; or (b) obstacles to solving the problem.

This was advice from a senior government official about what to do: if you hear that the government plans “putting something in place that’s going to make it harder for you to farm, contact USDA. Talk to them directly. Find out what it is that you’re concerned about. My suspicion is a lot of times they’re going to be able to answer your questions and it will turn out that some of your fears are unfounded.” A reporter took the advice:

Wednesday, 2:40 p.m. ET: After calling the USDA’s main line, I am told to call the Illinois Department of Agriculture. Here, I am patched through to a man who is identified as being in charge of “support services.” I leave a message.

3:53 p.m.: The man calls me back and recommends in a voicemail message that I call the Illinois Farm Bureau — a non-governmental organization.

4:02 p.m.: A woman at the Illinois Farm Bureau connects me to someone in the organization’s government affairs department. That person tells me they “don’t quite know who to refer you to.”

4:06 p.m.: I call the Illinois Department of Agriculture again, letting the person I spoke with earlier know that calling the Illinois Farm Bureau had not been fruitful. He says “those are the kinds of groups that are kind of on top of this or kind of follow things like this. We deal with pesticide here in our bureau.”

“You only deal with pesticides?” I ask.

“We deal with other things … but we mainly deal with pesticides here,” he says, and gives me the phone number for the office of the department’s director, where he says there are “policy people” as well as the director’s staff.

4:10 p.m.: Someone at the director’s office transfers me to the agriculture products inspection department, where a woman says their branch deals with things like animal feed, seed and fertilizer.

“I’m going to transfer you to one of the guys at environmental programs.”

4:15 p.m.: I reach the answering machine at the environmental programs department, and leave a message.

4:57 p.m.: A man from the environmental programs department gets back to me: “I hate to be the regular state worker that’s always accused of passing the buck, but noise and dust regulation would be under our environmental protection agency, rather than the Agriculture Department,” he says, adding that he has forwarded my name and number to the agriculture adviser at IEPA.

On Thursday morning, POLITICO started the hunt for an answer again, this time calling the USDA’s local office in Henry County, Ill., where the town hall took place.

9:42 a.m.: Asked if someone at the office might be able to provide me with the information I requested, the woman on the phone responds, “Not right now. We may have to actually look that up — did you Google this or anything?”

When I say that I’m a reporter and would like to discuss my experience with someone who handles media relations there, I am referred to the USDA’s state office in Champaign. I leave a message there.

10:40 a.m.: A spokeswoman for the Illinois Natural Resources Conservation Service calls me, to whom I explain my multiple attempts on Wednesday and Thursday to retrieve the information I was looking for.

“What I can tell you is our particular agency does not deal with regulations,” she tells me. “We deal with volunteers who voluntarily want to do things. I think the reason you got that response from the Cambridge office is because in regard to noise and dust regulation, we don’t have anything to do with that.”

She adds that the EPA would be more capable of answering questions regarding regulations.

Finally, I call the USDA’s main media relations department, based here in Washington, where I explain to a spokesperson about my failed attempts to obtain an answer to the Illinois farmer’s question. This was their response, via email:

“Secretary Vilsack continues to work closely with members of the Cabinet to help them engage with the agricultural community to ensure that we are separating fact from fiction on regulations because the administration is committed to providing greater certainty for farmers and ranchers. Because the question that was posed did not fall within USDA jurisdiction, it does not provide a fair representation of USDA’s robust efforts to get the right information to our producers throughout the country.”

Finally, this: “The response — eventually — from a USDA representative was that “the question that was posed did not fall within USDA jurisdiction,” but rather the Environmental Protection Agency.” So the reporter followed up:

Thursday, 3:37 p.m.: I call the EPA’s main number, where the operator connects me to someone else. When I explain that I would like to find out information about regulations concerning noise, dust and water runoff regulations and their possible effects on Illinois farmers, I am told that Illinois falls under “Region 5” and given their number.

3:41 p.m.: At the regional office, I am transferred to somebody that deals with “clean air.”

“Have you gone through our website by any chance?” the person asks. “Our online information is very useful. Just in general practice, it’s good.”

I said I was hoping to get some information over the phone and am given contact numbers for two people: one that handles “compliance enforcement” and someone else that works with “water compliance.” I call both numbers and leave a message.

3:50 p.m.: Then I call back the regional office, explaining that both people were not at their desks.

“Normally Friday is not a good time — a lot of people don’t work on Friday,” the same person from earlier says. I mention that today is Thursday, to which they respond: “A lot of people take Friday off, but some people take Wednesday or Thursday off, too. And I know it’s the end of the summer, but people grab the opportunity to take a vacation before school.”

The person gives me two more people’s contact information: one who is an “environmental engineer” there, and another one who is at the “air and radiation division.” Both of them are also not at their desks, and I leave messages.

4:46 p.m.: I hear back from the “environmental engineer,” who tells me I should speak to the person at the air and radiation division, with whom I left a message earlier.

5:27 p.m.: The person from the air division calls back, who explains he wouldn’t be the best person to talk to about water and noise regulations, and because noise regulations are not federally enforceable, the Illinois EPA would be the place to call.

As for dust regulations, he says he would just need to know what kind of dust the farmer was talking about. “Without knowing what kind of source he’s talking about, it’d be pretty hard to generalize what requirements there are,” he says, adding that he would be happy to speak to the farmer from the town hall.

5:38 p.m.: At the end of the day, I ask EPA spokesman Brendan Gilfillan for a comment on our experience with calling the EPA to follow up on USDA’s response to Thursday’s story. This was his response via email:

“Below is an update on farm dust — while we do have statutory authority on noise pollution, I’m not aware of any pending rules or standards on that. “Farm dust: This is a myth the Administrator has debunked personally on several occasions. While EPA is mandated by the CAA to review air quality standards for pollutants like farm dust every five years, and that review is currently ongoing, we have no plans to put stricter standards in place. That review, at Administrator’s direction, has involved extensive outreach to farmers and ranchers”

Of course this might be a truthful response. But consider that it came after the first embarrassing story, and that it was a spokesman’s belated response to a reporter whom he knew was going to write another story embarrassing to the administration and to the government generally. Please remind us why it’s a good idea to give any more power or tax dollars to these buffoons.