Fiscal Year 2009 Budget Resolutions

This Budget Update looks at the budget resolutions passed by both the House (H. Con. Res. 312) and Senate (S. Con. Res. 70), compared to each other as well as to the CBO March baseline and the President’s budget as reestimated by CBO.

• The House-passed budget should be commended for complying with pay-as-you-go (PAYGO) rules without exception. The budget plan assumes that all changes to revenues and mandatory spending would be offset so that deficits would not be increased over the six- and eleven-year time periods.
  


• Neither the House nor the Senate budget makes any attempt to control the unsustainable growth of mandatory spending programs. This is a disappointing shortcoming given the tremendous fiscal challenges the country faces. Both the President's budget and the alternative budget proposed by Congressman Paul Ryan (R-WI) included significant savings in the areas of entitlements. We would have liked to see these as the beginning of the discussion about how to slow the growth of the major entitlement programs.
  


• As was the case with the President's budget, both budgets achieve balance by 2012, but would do so only by omitting likely costs from the budget. We therefore do not believe the small budget surpluses that are projected are realistic.
  


• The major issues that will have to be worked out between the House’s and Senate’s budgets include: reconciliation, whether or not the resolution assumes the AMT patch is offset, the Baucus amendment in the Senate version that would reduce the budget surplus by extending specific tax cuts currently set to expire, the stimulus package, and discretionary spending.

For the full text of the budget update, please see the PDF attached below.