The new president wants Congress to approve upwards of $800 billion in cash and tax credits by mid-February to, hopefully, stem the worst economic slide any American under 70 has experienced.
And that’s in addition to the yet-to-be spent $350 billion from the $700 billion, October 2008 bank bailout.
How do you spend $1.1 trillion […]
On Jan. 8, 2008, an investment banker at Goldman Sachs predicted crude oil prices would top $200 a barrel by summer, then slip lower but remain well above $100 through 2011.
What looked smart then looks ridiculous now.
Today, crude prices are far closer to zero than $200 and the spectacularly wrong investment banker, like […]
If conventional leadership and bureaucratic competency had a face, it would look exactly like Thomas J. Vilsack: round as an apple pie, chin disappearing under sagging cheeks, graying (and amply present) hair.
President-elect Barack Obama’s selection of Vilsack, the two-term (1998-2006) Iowa governor, to lead the U.S. Department of Agriculture is as safe and sound […]
It’s the end of the year, but columnist Alan Guebert still has unanswered questions.
(Author’s note: The following column was first published the week of Christmas 1998. Now, by tradition, it returns. Merry Christmas. –Alan)
The Christmas tree was a scrub cedar hacked from the edge of the woods that bordered the farm.
Big-bulbed lights, strung in barber pole fashion, generated almost as much heat as the nearby wood […]
If recent conversations with elevator managers and farmers are even slightly predictive, it’s gonna be a long, cold winter in corn and soybean country because the majority of 2008 grain, they say, is — gulp — unpriced.
Wow.
In my flat, black and beautiful neighborhood, that’s a killer on land that giggled up 200 bushel […]
Before ya’ll go gettin’ cheery-cheeked and weepy-eyed for Christmas, Old Scrooge here has some sour facts that will be waitin’ for you on the backside of the holiday season.
Fact number one
After Secretary of Treasury Henry Paulson’s bailout of banking giant Citigroup, the total amount of government cash thrown into this year’s credit mess is […]
In a brief presentation to some 250 or so farm and small town members of Iowa mutual insurance companies Nov. 17, I asked for a show of hands on two questions.
First, I asked, regardless who is president, how many here think there will not be some sort of national health care program within the […]
Whoever said elections don’t matter was either a royalist or a royal idiot.
Of course elections matter.
For proof, ask Robin Hayes, Marilyn Musgrave, Randy Kuhl or Tim Walberg. All are Republican members of the House Ag Committee who, on Nov. 4, were fired by their constituents in, respectively, North Carolina, Colorado, New York and […]
One of the more astute observations on the role of government in farm policy ever uttered was offered by then-congressman, later (from 1991-93) secretary of agriculture, Ed Madigan.
“The majority of farmers,” Madigan, a moderate Republican, told me in a September 1984 interview between campaigning around his central Illinois district, “just want to be left […]
