Yesterday the House and Senate passed nearly identical versions of a budget blueprint for next year. The congressional budgets are largely status quo--spending and revenues are similar to this year's levels, and include slight increases to domestic spending relative to Bush's proposal.

Over time, however, the budgets assume a declining level of discretionary spending (which is the spending that Congress allocates on an annual basis for things like national defense, infrastructure, community development, and many other programs.) They also assume that some of the Bush tax changes would be reversed, while leaving some room for extending tax cuts for low and moderate income taxpayers.

Update: To put this into context, here is the historical data with 5 year outlook under Bush's proposed budget. Note that the defense portion is too low, since Bush does not include spending on Iraq in the out years.

Budget passes | Posted March 14, 2008 10:31 AM by John Irons