Ramesh, that home-and-abroad cotton-subsidies story is maddening. It’s also an example of why I despair over the prospect of ever being able to seriously reform spending, even if there were a solid conservative majority in Congress. My home House district, Texas’s 19th, is solidly Republican, and is represented by Randy Neugebauer, generally considered one of the most conservative members of the House. In fact, in 2011 National Journal ranked him the House’s most conservative member. But the biggest businesses in the 19th House district are (1) cotton farming and (2) Texas Tech University, meaning that its economy is very heavily dependent on government spending at the federal and state level. Six of the ten largest employers are public entities, and voters in the district’s largest city, Lubbock, still remember with intense bitterness the loss of another big government-sponsored piece of the local economy, Reese Air Force Base.

Which is to say, in one of the country’s most conservative House districts, it would probably be pretty hard to make a winning case for serious spending cuts, even in the narrow category of non-defense, non-entitlement spending.

Reese was closed as part of the Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) process, and while BRAC certainly has its critics, it seems to me that BRAC might be a possible model for trimming some domestic spending, too, herding sacred domestic cows into one set of recommendations that have to be either accepted in toto or rejected in toto.

But even that kind of a process would be politically very difficult to execute, I suspect. Neugebauer, unsurprisingly, was one of the most energetic advocates of maintaining U.S. cotton subsidies in the wake of the original WTO ruling in the Brazil matter a decade ago, but for Texas the issue was a double-bind: One the one hand, cotton farmers want their subsidies; on the other hand, Brazilian sanctions on U.S. exports would have hit Texas especially hard, Texas being one of our fastest-growing export states, with Brazil as one of its exporters’ largest markets.

But $300 million in other people’s money can smooth over a great many problems.