That's the question we'll finally see answered in the Senate later this morning. It lodges most directly against Democrats. Some of them have decided they have to swallow unlimited payments to gigantic rice and cotton operations, almost all of them in the South, in exchange for modest assistance for their own farmers in New England or the midwest.

The math tells it all. The Senate agriculture committee's subsidy limit "reforms", like their House counterparts, will save trivial amounts of money--perhaps $50 million per year--precisely because they were fashioned by the subsidy lobby to have no impact.

Mission accomplished.

The Dorgan-Grassley and Klobuchar amendments save more because they trim more from the subsidies that go to the very largest operations.

Even so, the savings will total up to only a few hundred million dollars per year, at most, leaving over $8 billion going to the subsidized crops. By voting against real reform amendments, senators will also be voting against reinvestment of the savings in critically underfunded nutrition programs like Food Stamps, which unlike subsidy handouts are brutally means-tested, as well as conservation, organic farming and other priorities.

And what would the resulting set of "limits" amount to if Dorgan-Grassley and Klobuchar were to become the law of the land? The Washington Post's bottom line can't be repeated often enough:

Note that even if both of these amendments pass, a farm family making $749,999 a year could still receive a $249,999 handout from the taxpayers. For a Democratic Congress eager to restore a modicum of balance to the distribution of income in America, this should be a very easy call.