Farm subsidies going away?

In Joseph Heller’s classic novel of World War II, “Catch-22,” commanding officer Major Major Major, who was promoted to major while still in basic training by an IBM machine “with a sense of humor almost as keen as his father’s,” is portrayed as a staunch Calvinist from a family of Iowa farmers who believe all federal aid represents creeping socialism, with the exception of farm subsidies, “which are divinely ordained.”

Like much satire, this is funny precisely because it’s closer to truth than we might like to admit — as most presidential candidates in pursuit of the Iowa farm vote could confirm.

Will farm subsidies ever end?

Rep. Tim Huelskamp, a freshman Republican and fifth-generation corn farmer, says they have to. “Something’s going to go away,” he told a few dozen townspeople sitting patiently on the hard, wooden benches of the Graham County Courthouse in Hill City, Kan., recently. “The direct payments are going to go away.”

Direct crop subsidies totaled about $5 billion last year. Given today’s budget conditions, that simply can’t continue.

“There’s no sacred cows anymore,” Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, a farmer, said in April in a conference call with Iowa reporters. “The bottom line is, ag should be cut like everything else, but no more than anything else. I think direct payments will be done away with.”

Indeed, the nation’s debt and deficit problems are now huge enough that farm subsidies — like everything else the federal government does — are about to be cut, because they have to be.

Which is not to say we’re not hearing double-talk here, because we are.

So far, The Washington Post reports, “the plans spare the agricultural program that farmers and their backers in Congress say is the most essential: insurance to help growers if they have a bad yield or lose crops because of extreme weather, such as a tornado or drought.”

Ah, just the “insurance” program. OK.

And then, late Wednesday, came the oh-so-predictable news: “Republicans,” The Associated Press reported, “have quietly maneuvered to prevent a House spending bill from chipping away at federal farm subsidies, instead forging ahead with much larger cuts to domestic and international food aid.”

The GOP move might block as much as $167 million in cuts in direct payments to farmers. “The maneuver,” The AP notes, “along with the Senate’s refusal Tuesday to end a $5 billion annual tax subsidy for ethanol-gasoline blends, illustrates just how difficult it will be for Congress to come up with even a fraction of the trillions in budget savings over the next decade that Republicans have promised.”

And the march toward the cliff continues.