House Approves $2.8 Trillion GOP Budget Proposal

The House passed a $2.8 trillion budget blueprint early today after GOP moderates won a promise for modest increases in spending on education, health and other social programs.

The House passed the Republican plan by a 218 to 210 vote.

For GOP leaders, passage of the Republican plan avoided the embarrassment of not being able to pass a budget through the House for the first time since congressional budget rules were put in place in 1975.

It is improbable, however, that the House and Senate will be able to agree on a mutual budget plan. Differences between House conservatives determined to stick with President Bush's caps on agency budgets funded each year and Senate GOP moderates determined to breach them simply appear too great.

Still, the debate on the budget resolution -- a nonbinding blueprint that sets the broad outlines for upcoming tax and spending bills -- gave Democrats and Republicans ample opportunity to illustrate the differences between their parties.

For Republicans, the plan steers a steady path limiting the growth of spending while assuming $228 billion in additional tax cuts over five years, much of which would go toward extending GOP tax cuts slated to expire in 2010.

They credited existing tax cuts with a booming economy producing surging revenues that are driving current-year deficit estimates perhaps $100 billion below the record $423 billion in red ink predicted by the White House in February.

Majority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) said the plan "strengthens our efforts to control spending and, coupled with a robust economy fueled by tax relief, is making real progress in driving down the deficit."

The House vote came hours after Bush signed a deficit-financed $70 billion tax cut bill extending lower rates for investors and saving billions for families with above-average incomes threatened by the alternative minimum tax.

But those tax plans are simply illustrative because the budget plan does not take the necessary steps under Congress' arcane budget process to facilitate their passage through the filibuster-prone Senate.

Democrats countered that the House GOP plan requires a $653 billion increase in the national debt to $9.6 trillion and that the deficits produced by the plan are likely to be far larger than the $1.1 trillion Republicans assume will accumulate under the measure if its policies are followed.

That is because the measure does not take account of the long-term costs of the war in Iraq or of shielding middle- to upper-income taxpayers from the alternative minimum tax. Many of the long-term spending cuts assumed by the GOP plan are politically unsustainable.

"The House Republican budget makes the deficit worse, offers no plan to bring the budget back to balance and adds to the growing burden of the national debt," said Rep. John M. Spratt Jr. (S.C.) ranking Democrat on the Budget Committee. "The Democratic budget . . . rejects the Republican budget's harmful cuts to domestic priorities while still reaching balance in 2012."

Republicans voted down a Democratic alternative that contained more funding for popular domestic programs such as education, veterans health care and health research while balancing the budget by 2012 -- but only by allowing hundreds of billions of dollars in GOP-passed tax cuts to expire.