Dreams on a Collision Course

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. Middle-class tax cuts! Universal health care! Alternative energy! They dangle these goodies before voters like a shiny set of keys in front of a grasping infant and say with the straightest of faces that this is all eminently affordable.

Every four years, after the election, those high-flying campaign plans collide with the reality of separate branches, entrenched interests and the relentless math of real-world budgets. Campaigns don't have to cope with Congressional Budget Office scores or Senate filibuster rules.

Still, fantasy budgeting is an important exercise. It offers insights into candidates' priorities and commitment to fiscal discipline. It shows how they reconcile responsible policy and winning politics. After all, one of the fantasy budgets of 2008 will have to be transformed quickly into an actual budget.

And so, I've spent an embarrassing amount of time recently constructing spreadsheets and squinting at tax tables to understand how the proposals of John McCain, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton add up and whether they've put forward credible ways to pay for them.

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. In Washington, if you want money for your pet program and I want some for mine, the inevitable solution is to give us both more. So those advocating extra funding for food stamps and conservation got their money, but at the price of continuing and expanding benefits for farmers.

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?

Thanks to Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the racehorse industry would get quicker depreciation and lower capital gains taxes for horses, a purse worth $489 million. Thanks to Democratic Sen. Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, the timber industry would get a $435 million tax break.