If U.S. agriculture is doing so well, why subsidize the farmers? Time to eliminate the USDA?

The Cato Institute included the USDA in its "Downsize the Federal Government" series. The USDA was established in 1862 when we needed to have a federal agency help organize our agricultural industry. Nowadays the agriculture industry is as active as most other industries in the US, it is surviving and thriving. Begs the question of why increase government spending to cover the USDA? What are the taxpayers paying for? How about $20B in farm subsidies, $110B in food subsidies, $5M for oversight/administration, and over $1B of loss due to fraud and abuse. Because the USDA is involved in price regulating, they also set the prices on US farmed items, such as sugar, which is two times more expensive in the US than elsewhere. What if we eliminated the USDA? Cato proposes a cost savings of $140B! Not bad.

If you are bored, or curious...new Federal apps for your phone.

It must be because we are all coming back from the holidays that I thought this article was interesting. In any case, there are a few good apps worthy of downloading from the Federal government. If you are interested, the link is here. I have not tried to use any of the apps. Might pace myself and try them out tomorrow!

CIA + $3B = FLOP?

How is it that government agencies make enormous mistakes using money that we give them, and it is ok? This time the CIA admitted that its project titled GDI - Global Deployment Initiative did not live up to expectations. Matter of fact, it didn't do much of anything except waste more government (taxpayer) money. Interesting.

Is it time to PaaS!

The latest article in the Federal Times references a recent government study that confirms the use of maintaining platforms on the cloud would result in significant cost savings. Government agencies are looking to the cloud for software application development, which would reduce IT project development time by 31%. Using platforms as a service is a low risk and effective savings alternate to the current type of support provided. Estimates of the savings are in the billions of dollars ($20B) annually.

Ideas on Government Spending Cuts

The Cato Institute and DownsizeGovernment.org teamed up to create budget cuts to significantly reduce government spending over the next 10 years. While some of the changes are common sense, a lot of their ideas are very insightful and will help reduce the debt as well. The idea of both organizations is to put the responsibilities on people and the states and keep it out of the hands of the federal government. The dependency for government intervention is overwhelming and is going in the wrong direction, this plan is a good start to reverse that dependency.

What is reputation risk?

Risk management has been an important part of doing business for many years. Risk management includes the information gained from potential partners and suppliers. Nowadays, managing risk is more about business intelligence of a company's reputation. It means, what is a potential partner or supplier willing to do to get the job done. Corruption, reduced quality of service or products, and compliance are the top three concerns when managing risk. Surveys were completed in this article from the WSJ regarding the types of reputation risk.

Antitrust Enforcement by the FTC and DOJ is becoming too intrusive. Whatever happended to free markets?

After reading the policy analysis by The Cato Institute on antitrust enforcement, I was surprised that there was more regulation by the Obama administration than the Bush or Clinton administration. I was not surprised that there was more intrusive regulation occurring causing industry changes in the Obama administration. Very scary! The analysis overall was very interesting and thought provoking. The old theory from Adam Smith to let the invisible hand (i.e. free market, less government intervention) lead markets is vanishing.