Farmers across the political spectrum who happen to collect subsidies from taxpayers commonly unpack a familiar talking point to blunt criticism of the payments, and we'll hear it again when we roll out our dramatic new database June 12. "We don't keep the money, it's not 'profit'," they'll say. "We just turn right around and pay it out to cover our expenses." Which expenses, they seem to believe, are higher than the urban majority (who "don't know where their food comes from") could possibly comprehend.

I've often wondered why so many farmers seem to think a New Yorker paying $2,300 a month for an efficiency, or a suburbanite buying a four dollar latte for the cup holder of her $40,000 SUV, will register shocked sympathy upon hearing that a combine (whatever that is) costs $180,000--when you couldn't touch a 1 BDR condo for that price on either coast. Someone's out of touch here, and I'm not sure its all of us who supposedly don't know milk doesn't come in a carton. My experience is just the opposite. I've seen many a farmer's eyes widen at the prices on a DC menu (though it must be said they invariably fight you for the check), and many a Beltway denizen drool over small-town real estate prices.

Nonetheless, this particular circling of the subsidy wagons amounts to saying that farm payments don't benefit the people or businesses who actually collect them from the taxpayer. The real beneficiaries, the argument goes, are the businesses farmers buy their inputs from, the banks that lend them money to own and operate their farms, the feedlots and grain conglomerates that buy the "cheap food" (or cotton) the subsidies pay farmers to grow in excess.

Translated to those of us in the paved world, this tortured defense amounts to saying that your salary isn't really paid to you, but to the bank that holds the note on your car or the mortgage on your home, or to the landlord who owns that $2,300-a-month efficiency you're renting. Will he ever fix the dishwasher? You're just the middleman, the pass through. After all, is it really your paycheck if most of it flies out the window to pay the cell phone, restaurant and dry cleaning bills, buy health insurance, keep your kid in college, or cover that vacation to Cancun?

No one knows how farmers who receive subsidies spend them, of course. No government rules stipulate how farmers must use their payments, any more than regulations out of Washington prescribe how seniors must spend their Social Security checks. Farm subsidies can be plowed into the farm or into a vacation home. It's no one's business but theirs.

Given the meager amount most recipients collect--a few hundred bucks a year--subsidies can't possibly make most farmers rich (two-thirds of farmers collect no farm bill subsidies at all). Then again, some recipients are significantly enriched by subsidies, particularly if they are landowners whose investments are both secured and inflated in value by a steady stream of taxpayer support. USDA studies (like this one) routinely show that the biggest recipients have net worths far in excess of most Americans.

...slightly over one percent of farm households received about 25% of total government payments to farm households, and about one-fifth of one percent of farm households received almost 9% of all payments. Moreover, households in the highest payment category (more than $150,000 of government payments) averaged more than $2.1 million dollars of net worth. By these tenancy-adjusted measures of well-being, a disproportionate share of government payments went to well-off farmers in 1999.

Which is to say that wealth and income status officially have almost nothing to do with qualifying for farm subsidies. A person of very considerable means, with an adjusted gross income of up to $2.5 million per year under federal rules, can legally collect farm subsidies that range from trivial amounts to seven figures. Taxpayers are well within their rights to take offense, or at least raise an eyebrow, all along that wasteful continuum. And big farmers (earning 75 percent of that $2.5 million AGI from agriculture) are exempt from even this laughable eligibility "limit".

It's also no doubt the case that some of the very largest recipients of federal farm subsidies, far from being enriched by the taxpayers' money, would not have been able to survive at all, much less expand their operations, without a constant infusion of big government checks.

But what is to be said about a government policy that obligates taxpayers to provide hundreds of thousands of dollars in unencumbered aid every year, for years on end and with no end in sight, just to keep one business and its owners on the brink of insolvency? Isn't that policy just as bad, in its way, as a subsidy that makes the wealthy wealthier? And why do we do so much for farm businesses and by comparison so little for factory workers laid off by foreign competition, or small businesses that struggle year after year?

Let's be clear. Farm subsidies go to, and benefit, the businesses and people who collect them, no matter what bills it helps them pay, no matter how bitterly or resentfully they pay them--with taxpayers' money. Should common sense fail to parse meaning here, it is plain enough in any dictionary you might care to consult:

...a direct pecuniary aid furnished by a government to a private industrial undertaking, a charity organization, or the like. (Random House)

Monetary assistance granted by a government to a person or group in support of an enterprise regarded as being in the public interest. (American Heritage)

...a grant paid by a government to an enterprise that benefits the public. (WordNet)

A grant made by a government to some individual or business in order to maintain an acceptable standard of living or to stimulate economic growth. (American Heritage New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy)

The important policy questions in this farm bill cycle have much less to do with what becomes of subsidy payments than with who receives them, and why. Congress has sloppily decreed through the years that you can collect farm subsidies whether you really need them or just because they're there for the collecting. You'd be stupid not to partake either way.

Which is why our original Farm Subsidy Database, and even more so its forthcoming upgrade, affords views of farm policy that alternate between high purpose and high satire.