Farm Bill On The Ropes

The Des Moines Register gets down to brass tacks when it comes to how Washington impacts Iowa:

So much for that farm bill Congress was writing. The failure of the congressional supercommittee to come up with a plan to reduce the federal budget deficit throws in doubt the future of federal crop subsidies after next year.
A formal announcement of the farm bill’s demise is expected later this afternoon from the House and Senate agriculture committees.
Existing farm programs expire in 2012, and farm groups had hoped to insert a new farm bill in a deficit-reduction plan so that crop subsidies would be protected from attack on the House or Senate floor.  By law, the House and Senate couldn’t change anything that would have been in the supercommittee’s plan, including the farm bill.
But with the supercommittee deadlocked, Congress will have to start over on the farm bill next year.

I've got to say that with 4 great years of farming in a row, direct payments should seriously be reconsidered in the budget balancing debate.  I can see the benefits of the crop insurance subsidies, but the direct payments ought to go away for a few years.

Overall, if this country is as center-right as conservatives claim, I wouldn't see so many stories in local papers about how the budget cuts might affect whatever mjaor local federal spending, and how local congressmen need to protect said spending.  Here, that is Wright-Patterson AFB, in Iowa it is farm subsidies.  It seems certain that everybody wants somebody else's ox gored.  Unfortunately, that isn't how things work.