(FORTUNE Magazine) – Under American law, you are ineligible for public assistance if you have as little as $1,000 in financial assets. Although occasionally denounced as excessively hard-nosed, the requirement is all too logical. The purpose of public assistance is to help you obtain life's necessities -- not to help you save. But since money is fungible, any assistance you get while retaining your own funds is, in effect, enabling you to save. This whole train of thought leaped into consciousness the other day when we picked up the paper and morosely read that the Bush Administration is proposing a bit of public assistance for the Soviet Union. It would take the form of subsidies, apparently worth $15 million or so, to reduce the price of wheat sold to the Russians. The decision seems to have several strands to it, one of which is old reliable farm-bloc politics. In addition, however, some Bushmen seem to feel that the present Soviet leadership, whose perestroika they support, is stone cold dead in the market and needs help for its desolate civilian economy. But wait: The Politburo is plainly not down to its last kopek. Soviet defense spending, as noted here a fortnight ago, is still rising by 3% in real terms (vs. a planned U.S. decline of 1%). The Russians still send an avalanche of military aid to their assorted unlovable clients abroad: over $500 million a year to the Sandinistas in Nicaragua (while we have been defunding the contras); another $1.5 billion or so to Castro; about $1.5 billion a year to Angola; $200 million or so to the Marxists trying to run Mozambique; maybe $350 million to the Communists in South Yemen; and $1 billion or so to Mengistu in Ethiopia, arguably the world's most genocidal ruler. Depraved Washington, D.C., is naturally full of forgiving folks ready to excuse all the foregoing, arguing that we cannot reasonably expect the Muscovites to just abandon all these clients, even in times of stringency at home. But even in the District, we have not yet heard anybody arguing out loud that the U.S. should help pay for those clients. Which, until somebody revokes the logic of fungibility, we would be doing with every dollar of wheat subsidies sent to the Russians. If you have trouble seeing it in exactly that perspective, just try thinking of them as welfare cheats.