Now that the government has reopened, Congressional Budget Committee Chairmen Senator Patty Murray (D-Washington) and Representative Paul Ryan (R-Wisconsin) have begun the process of creating a budget plan that must be completed by 13 December. If the bicameral budget process does not work, then a second sequester will be imposed by 15 January 2014. The first sequester took place on 3 January 2013 as part of the Deficit Control Act of 2011. That legislation provided budget targets for Congress to meet and would trigger an across the board sequester if those targets were not met. This means, whether overtly or covertly, much of the budget committees' efforts will be channeled into exempting certain types of spending from the sequester. The...
Communicating importance of value-added products
Facing increasing pressure to quantify the value of export promotion efforts to investors, a U.S. industry organization retained WPI to develop a quantitative model that better communicated the importance of exports. The resulting model concluded that value-added meat exports contributed $0.45 cents per bushel to the price of corn, increasing support for that sector’s financial support of WPI’s client. In addition to serving the red meat industry with this type of analysis, WPI has generated similar deliverables for the U.S. soybean and poultry/egg industries.