I guess it’s getting better. My pig case only required 8.25 hours of depositions today. Still no lunch break. We’re not very good planners, I guess. I’m just surprised that this case hasn’t diminished my appetite for pork. Open thread.

I came across an Associated Press article entitled Brooke Astor’s Son Indicted. Apparently there is some scandal associated with Brooke Astor’s $198 million estate. Brooke was the wife of Vincent Astor (he was her third husband). Vincent Astor was the great-great-grandson of John Jacob Astor who made a fortune in fur trading and New York real estate. Fur trading. In the 18th century.

I don’t know anything about subsequent Astors, so maybe they were just as shrewd, lucky, and able as great grandpa John Jacob. But, assuming they weren’t, in America – supposedly the land of the meritocracy – it seems fundamentally wrong to me that a single individual’s fortune should insulate his family for 200 years from rising and falling on their own merits.

Niki Kelly, writing for the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette, has an article entitled Living centers, state agency in money melee. Apparently the State budgeted a 6,000% increase for “centers that help people with severe disabilities in about 50 counties to remain participating members in their communities through peer support, service referrals, independent living skills training, mobility assistance and public education.” The State increased its part of the funding from $41,000 to $2.5 million. I suspect this reflects an understanding by legislators that this model is better for the individual and ultimately probably cheaper than models where the individual basically gets walled off from the community.

Trouble is, FSSA refuses to release the money. According to the folks at the independent living centers, the State keeps moving the goal posts on the kind of paperwork it needs before it will release the money.

According to the letter, the state issued a solicitation for proposals for the new funding on June 4 and each center submitted individual proposals for the funds allocated by the General Assembly.

In July, they were asked for a specific spending plan with measurable outcomes.

After much confusion, the final documents were turned in Aug. 31.

The centers became concerned that the process would not be finished by Oct. 1 – when the state-funded centers would run out of money – so the state extended the contract for three months using the old funding levels.

Discussions have continued back and forth, according to the letter, with FSSA always asking for additional data.

“We have complied with every request the state has made. We have developed proposals to meet their stated requirements only to be told that they have come up with more requirements and need more information. We have provided this additional information,” the letter said. “We have developed (in collaboration with state staff members) clear outcomes that we will achieve.

“No one will tell us where the actual hold up is and, if it is true that they need more information, no one at the state is able to tell us what it is they want.”

This is oddly similar to what we have seen in some circumstances in struggles local governments have had getting their budgets approved by the Department of Local Government Finance — delays related to new demands for information by the State. And, given the past behavior of the Daniels administration, you can’t even be sure their withholding is legal. Perhaps they just think their demands for information are good ideas and, legal or not, they’ll do what they want and hope the legislature retroactively legalizes their actions.

Frankfort is a town in Clinton County, 50 miles or so north of Indianapolis. They have been having a series of fora on illegal immigration. Frankfort is a town with a number of problems. One of the voices suggesting illegal immigration as one of the most significant reasons for the problems is Vern Kaspar a staunch conservative and owner of Kaspar Communications which at least includes one of the area’s FM stations.

If Frankfort decides to get “tough on illegal immigration,” I guess we can use them as guinea pigs to see how significant the illegal immigration problem was to Frankfort’s overall condition. Indiana will be the control. If Frankfort suddenly gets a lot better after they “get tough,” we’ll have reason to think that was the problem. If it doesn’t, then the problem – as I suspect – isn’t primarily with illegal immigrants.

My exposure to Frankfort is primarily through its debtors in the context of my collection efforts. To me, Frankfort’s poor population seems a little more entrenched and a little shadier than a lot of the other places I go. They seem to work less frequently and seem less interested in paying off the debt than debtors in other places I go, like Tippecanoe, Benton, White, Carroll, and Montgomery counties. Though, I suppose, Cass County and Logansport gives me the same vibe as Clinton County and Frankfort. And, frankly, the Latino population does not seem any more likely to shirk its debts. If anything, they work harder to get things paid. Just one collection attorney’s perspective. Hardly scientific.

My thoughts are that a community should do what it can to control its illegal immigrant population. It should do this without targeting its legal immigrant population. And, this should be co-equal with any number of other community priorities. My sense is that, in Frankfort, illegal immigrants are a particularly visible scapegoat for some fairly amorphous and intractable problems the community has and would have even if every immigrant in town had the proper papers.

Joe Nocera, writing for the New York Times, has a column discussing the concept of a la carte pricing for cable channels. He says that an FCC study suggests that people’s cable prices would go up under a la carte pricing, even if they selected far fewer channels.

I don’t really follow the logic though.

The reason is that unmoored from the cable bundle, individual networks would have to charge vastly more money per subscriber. Under the current system, in which cable companies like Comcast pay the networks for carriage — and then pass on the cost to their customers — networks get to charge on the basis of everyone who subscribes to cable television, whether they watch the network or not. The system has the effect of generating more money than a network “deserves” based purely on viewership. Networks also get to charge more for advertising than they would if they were not part of the bundle.

Take, for instance, ESPN, which charges the highest amount of any cable network: $3 per subscriber per month. (I’m borrowing this example from a recent research note by Craig Moffett, the Sanford C. Bernstein cable analyst.) Suppose in an à la carte world, 25 percent of the nation’s cable subscribers take ESPN. If that were the case, the network would have to charge each subscriber not $3, but $12 a month to keep its revenue the same. (And don’t forget: with its $1.1 billion annual bill to the National Football League alone, ESPN is hardly in a position to tolerate declining revenues.)

What this suggests to me is that for every hard core ESPN viewer, there are 3 others who are getting charged $3 apiece under the bundled system to subsidize the hard core viewer’s reception of ESPN. (Thanks guys!) The ESPN viewer is apparently getting a $12 value for $3. But, the money is coming from somewhere. What value are these non-ESPN viewers getting for their $9? If the channels weren’t bundled, would that money otherwise go to the History channel? Are some channels getting less than they would otherwise because of the bundling?

Maybe I missed something obvious or maybe the writer failed to explain a crucial detail, but I’m not yet prepared to write off a la carte pricing as a good option for cable subscribers.