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The 16-day partial shutdown of the federal government and the wrangling in Washington over the nation's finances combined to shake consumers' confidence sharply in October, the private Conference Board reported Tuesday morning.

Its widely watched consumer confidence index dropped to 71.2 from 80.2 in September.

How consumers are feeling is an important economic indicator because they purchase about 70 percent of all the goods and services that businesses produce. If consumers scale back their spending because they aren't feeling like things are going well, that can set off an unfortunate chain of events: soft sales that lead companies to postpone hiring or shed some workers, moves that then make consumers feel even more nervous and more reluctant to spend.

In Tuesday's release, Conference Board economist Lynn Franco says that "the federal government shutdown and debt-ceiling crisis took a particularly large toll on consumers' expectations."

She adds that:

Community supported agriculture shares are moving out of the crisper and into the pantry.

That's the hope, anyway, of a growing number of farmers and small processors who are marketing local goods under the CSA model.

In traditional a CSA, a farmer sells shares of their fruit and vegetable crop ahead of the growing season to generate cash flow for the year. The farmer then provides boxes of seasonal produce on a regular basis to shareholders during the harvest.

The farmer and the customers share equally in the harvest, come bumper crop or blight. The practice started in the U.S. in Massachusetts back in 1986 and now rivals farmers markets as the best way to access local food. Local Harvest maintains a CSA registry, and to date there are close to 7,600 CSAs, up from 3,500 in 2008.

Community supported canners have copied the model, and they're helping to fill the gap in the winter months when CSA shares of fresh vegetables peter out. Their offerings might include dried beans, grains, baking mixes, frozen meats and farmhouse cheese in addition to salsa, jams, syrups, pickles and other fermented vegetables.

Cheryl Wixon's Kitchen operates out of Coastal Farm and Foods, an incubator for commercial small-scale food processing in Belfast, Maine. For $300, a share in Wixon's CSA will get you 54 jars of pasta and pizza sauces, cranberry ketchups and fruit jams and butters delivered between November and April.

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Two wily veterans of Congress' fiscal wars will lead the budget talks scheduled to start Wednesday: Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wisc. and Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., the chairs of the House and Senate budget committees.

As the 29 lawmakers on the budget conference committee — 22 from the Senate and 7 from the House — sit down to begin negotiations, they'll have in Ryan and Murray two lawmakers who from most accounts get along well despite their many differences.

"I think they've established a good working relationship with mutual respect for each other when you think about how many of our leaders aren't really talking to each other anymore," said Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget who has talked about fiscal matters with both lawmakers over the years.

Even so, you couldn't ask for a more striking contrast between two members of Congress in terms of their personal qualities or ideologies.

Here's a tale of the tape for Murray and Ryan:

Style

Ryan: A charismatic fitness buff who revels in the spotlight and discourses on fiscal minutiae the way Jay-Z spits rap lyrics. He's 43 years old, in his sixth term and is much better known than Murray thanks to his place on the 2012 Republican presidential ticket with Mitt Romney.

He became such a lightning rod for his 2011 proposal to turn Medicare into a voucher system that President Obama singled him out in a speech as Ryan sat in the front row. Democrats cut an ad featuring an actor portraying Ryan pushing Granny and her wheelchair off a cliff.

Murray: Charisma, or a spot on a national ticket, aren't what immediately come to mind when considering Murray. The 63-year old has quietly impressed her Senate colleagues despite her general colorlessness. In a group of spotlight-seeking egos, she has emerged as a leader, the fourth in the Senate Democrats' chain of command.

Murray has twice run Senate Democrats' election efforts. So she has much experience thinking like a campaign manager who's trying to appeal to her party's political base while expanding the map of potential seat pickups.

Budgets

Their competing ideologies are best seen in their fiscal 2014 budgets issued early this year.

Ryan: He proposes to balance the federal budget in 10 years with spending cuts and lower interest costs that would amount to $5.74 trillion in savings. He would leave sequestration intact. He also would get there with no tax increases and large cuts to entitlement programs. Most of his proposed savings would come from about $4 trillion in entitlement cuts over 10 years.

Murray: Her budget would leave the budget unbalanced after 10 years and not by a little. She would achieve $1.78 trillion in savings over that period. She would end sequestration, adding nearly $1 trillion in spending over a decade. Much of that spending would be for investments in education which is close to the heart of the one-time preschool teacher. In one of the biggest differences with Ryan, her proposed budget includes $810 billion in new revenues from higher taxes and fees.

An interesting similarity

Both were raised in families helped by the social-safety net programs when misfortune struck.

Ryan: He's the youngest of four children. His father died when he was 16 and Social Security survivor's benefits helped his mother pay his college tuition.

Murray: Her father developed multiple sclerosis when she was in her teens. After he could no longer work and before her mother found a job, the family of eight received welfare to survive the lean times.

What to expect

Murray co-chaired the supercommittee that failed to achieve an agreement to reduce deficits — leading to the sequester, with its $1 trillion of across-the-board spending cuts over 10 years. So she's truly motivated to have something to show this time.

Both Ryan and Murray have already lowered expectations for their budget conference. There will be no grand bargain on entitlement cuts and tax increases.

Instead, MacGuineas, who's been gathering intelligence from those close to the budget conferees expects the Murray and Ryan to work towards an agreement that would end perhaps part of the sequester cuts, maybe two years' worth. And she doesn't expect major entitlement cuts or tax increases in any final deal. More like changes to government subsidies and farm subsidies.

"Both are loyal to their respective parties but also interested in getting something done," she said.

Murray may have the easier hand to play, however, which could prove an advantage since she can persuasively argue after the united front Senate Democrats showed in the shutdown-debt ceiling fight, that her party is speaking with one voice. Not so for Ryan.

"What Chairman Murray is doing is keeping a pretty united group united," MacGuineas said. "She's close with leadership. She's close with members of the budget committee. And they're all walking pretty much in lockstep right now."

The Wisconsin Republican congressman has an entirely different hand to play. "Chairman Ryan has much tougher challenge," MacGuineas says. Ryan is persuasive and respected in the House Republican Conference as he showed during the shutdown fight where he nudged the House GOP away from the Tea Party focus on derailing the Affordable Care Act.

But "there's a huge diversity of opinion among his conference about what they should be doing." That's putting it mildly.

AGAINST THE MOTION

Joseph "Gray" Davis was the 37th governor of California. As governor, he signed legislation aimed at strengthening California's K-12 system by establishing the Academic Performance Index to increase accountability in schools, and worked to expand access to higher education with scholarships and college loans. Davis also funded and established Institutes of Science and Innovation in partnership with the University of California and private industry. Today, Davis is of counsel at Loeb & Loeb LLP; a member of the bipartisan Think Long Committee; a senior fellow at the UCLA School of Public Affairs; and honorary co-chair of the Southern California Leadership Council. He has also served as lieutenant governor, state controller and state assemblyman. He began his public service as a captain in the U.S. Army, earning the Bronze Star for meritorious service in Vietnam.

Michael Lind is a co-founder of the New America Foundation in Washington, D.C., where he is the policy director of its Economic Growth Program and Next Social Contract Initiative. A columnist for Salon, he has been a staff writer or editor at The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, The New Republic and The National Interest and contributes frequently to The New York Times and the Financial Times. He is the author of a number of books of history, political journalism, fiction and poetry, including Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States (2012). Lind has taught at Harvard and Johns Hopkins universities. He is a fifth-generation native of Texas, where he worked for the state legislature.