This being a free country, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are welcome to pander however feverishly they wish, promising vast new expenditures by a federal government already committed to wildly more spending than its taxpayers and its low-growth economy can afford.

Sanders first amused Americans who know their fiscal math with proposals for free college tuition, expanded Social Security, $1 trillion in infrastructure spending, “Medicare for all” …. The nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget calculates that his economic plans would push the top federal tax rate to about 77 percent. And, “When state and local taxes are included, the top rate rises to an average of about 85 percent (nationwide) ….”

Next Clinton, wary of again losing a nomination to a more liberal Democrat, scrambled to mimic Sanders. If you like window-shopping at the Lamborghini dealership on Sundays, when no salespeople are around to check your credit, then you’ll enjoy the bounty of Free Stuff that Clinton and Sanders promise to provide. Clinton’s serial diminishment during the Iowa caucuses campaign of the crisis menacing Social Security — “depletion of total trust fund reserves” in 2034, the system’s trustees warn — edges her toward the Cruz zone of doing or saying anything to win this nomination…

Given the distance from economic reality that Clinton and Sanders have catapulted in their exhortations, we cannot endorse either of them in the Illinois primary election.