Andrew is right on in calling all of the candidates to task for their fantasies of fiscal discipline in the face of such daunting challenges as the war, a weak economy, and the fiscal fiasco of the past seven years under President Bush 43.  John Brody of the New York Times and Jim Horney of the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities deserve public services award for bringing it all together in Brody's article Sunday.

Let's debunk the fantasies.

Fantasy #1: Earmark elimination and curtailing other wasteful spending will pay for the war.  Hardly!  Earmarks may have totaled $17 b. last year out of $2.2 trillion.  Furthermore, earmarks are best understood as allocations of appropriations that will occur in any event.  They have grown over the past decade because of disputes between Congress and the White House over spending priorities, not spending levels.  Eliminating them does not cut federal spending.  Fraud, waste, and abuse was a favorite term during the early days of President Reagan's presidency.  There was even a presidential commission in 1981 that identified $400 b. of fraud, waste, and abuse.  Many of these items were mischaracterized, and the budgetary savings it estimated were  largely without basis in fact.  Hardly any fraud, waste, and abuse spending cuts were enacted then, and we won't find many today.

Fantasy #2:  The peace dividend will pay for other priorities.  Dream on.  We thought we had a peace dividend coming after the Vietnam War ended in 1975, and President Bush 41 popularized the term in 1989 after President Reagan's largest peacetime defense increase in U.S. history, but the sad fact is that defense spending cuts are difficult to come by and take a long time to happen.  Defense was not finally cut substantially until the 1990s under President Clinton.  When you stop fighting a war, you still have to pay the troops, wherever they are, until you reduce troop levels.  You face higher costs from shutting down bases and transferring equipment.  Tanks and heavy artillery are expensive to move around.  Take an airplane out of an overseas base, and you have to fund basing it at home.  Interestingly, the advisers to the presidential candidates quoted in this article seem to understand this; they just have a hard time getting their candidates to admit it.

Fantasy #3: We will pay for it.   The check will be in the mail as soon as we win this election.  It's one thing to say you will strictly adhere to PAYGO, but it's another to actually deliver that.  The last thing the next president wants to see is all of his or her first 100 days priorities die on Capitol Hill because no tax increases or spending cuts can get enough votes to "pay for them."  The diet won't start until we gorge ourselves a few more times.

Fantasy #4: We will grow our way out of this.  That's what McCain's adviser and former Congressional Budget Office Director Doug Holtz-Eakin implied.  Let's focus on what's good for American families, and the budget will take care of itself.  This is wishful thinking.  Medicare doctors in Miami, who are wasting taxpayers dollars in overtreating the elderly without any improvement in health outcomes, are not going to give up that money without a fight.  Even if we turned around the decline in K-12 education quality, the payoffs in higher future federal tax revenues are a long way down the road.  Free trade benefits the overall economy and could marginally ease the federal deficit, but what about all those auto workers in Michigan and Ohio who can't compete anymore.  All of the presidential candidates support additional spending to help them retrain and to otherwise ease their plight.  That's going to increase federal spending.

The sad truth is that President Bush 43 and Congress squandered the fiscal discipline of the 1990s, and it won't be easy to regain.   One of the most conservative economists I know, Bruce Bartlett, wrote a book entitled Impostor in early 2006 documenting the sad story and got fired from his conservative think tank for his trouble.  The numbers are unavoidable.  We have federal tax revenues that are at the post-World War II average as a share of GDP, and we have spending that is out of control.  We're fighting a war we can't afford, and we have entitlement spending, particularly for Medicare, that we can't afford.

The next president and the one after that will spend a lot of time turning this around.  Otherwise, our kids will pay for it as possibly the first generation in American history to end up economically worse off than their parents.