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Some people play fantasy baseball. I've got a thing for fantasy budgets.
Every four years, presidential candidates serve up a glittering array of policy proposals. Every four years, after the election, those high-flying campaign plans collide with reality.
Still, fantasy budgeting offers insights into candidates' priorities and commitment to fiscal discipline.
And so, I've spent an embarrassing amount of time constructing spreadsheets and squinting at tax tables to understand how the proposals of John McCain, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton add up.
Short version: Each candidate's plans would incur new costs, for tax cuts or spending initiatives, in the hundreds of billions of dollars annually. The Democrats go through the exercise of showing, on paper anyway, how these would be financed. McCain offers up a cornucopia of new tax cuts that dwarfs the Democrats' spending plans, and he scarcely pretends that he would find offsetting savings.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, Congress has been demonstrating just how fantastical the candidates' budgetary aspirations are. This cold bucketful of reality comes in the bloated form of the pending farm bill. Farm income is up. Commodity prices are at record levels. What better moment for Congress to cut back on wasteful subsidies that flow to wealthy farmers, stymie trade talks and drive up global food prices?
Dream on. The result: a bipartisan pork -- and rice and cotton and corn -- festival that will cost $300 billion over the next five years. Under the measure, farmers would continue to get nearly $5 billion a year in crop subsidies, even if prices are soaring. As for President Bush's proposals to cap subsidies at $250,000 and provide them only to those earning less than $200,000? Dead on arrival.
Thanks to Democratic Sens. Kent Conrad (N.D.), and Max Baucus (Mont.), farmers in their drought-stricken states would benefit from a new, $3.8 billion program called permanent disaster relief -- this on top of subsidized crop insurance. Just wondering, but if the disaster is permanent, maybe that area is not a good place to farm?
In other words, regional self-interest and political self-preservation know no partisan boundaries.
Forgive me, then, if I'm a tad skeptical about Obama's claim that he would "stop funding wasteful, obsolete federal government programs that make no financial sense." Or Clinton's pledge to "take back at least $55 billion per year from special interests including the drug companies, oil companies, and firms that ship jobs overseas." Or McCain's incoherent plan to eliminate $100 billion in spending that originated in earmarks.
What are their chances? Just consider the farm bill, and the positions of the senators who would be president. McCain, to his credit, is opposed. But when the Senate passed its even porkier version of the farm bill last year, Clinton and Obama expressed disappointment about the absence of some reforms -- and proceeded to praise it.
"An important step towards renewing our nation's commitment to our farming communities," said Obama.
"A safety net for America's farmers," said Clinton, who had gone to bat for Upstate New York milk producers.
Proving my point: Fantasy budgeting is the easy part.
• Ruth Marcus is a columnist for the Washington Post Writers Group. |
