WHATEVER ELSE you may think of it, the budget that President Clinton sent to Congress earlier this month was fiscally responsible. The proposed initiatives were paid for. If a surplus materialized, the president recommended that it be used to pay down the debt in the name of preparing to meet the cost of Social Security when the baby boomers retire.

Now the Senate Republican leadership -- the Budget Committee Republicans with the apparent concurrence of the majority leader and his principal lieutenants -- has apparently settled on the outline of an alternative budget that would be at least equally disciplined in the face of even greater political pressure to the contrary. A lot of Republicans want to continue cutting taxes. They would finance the step with the prospective surplus. They see the combination as a way both to please the voters in an election year and shrink the government in the longer term. It's an obvious temptation to which the leaders -- themselves led by good budget soldier Pete Domenici, the longtime chairman of the budget panel -- have for now apparently commendably said no. We hope they persist.

The principal difference between the two budgets -- the one submitted, the other still just a sketch, and tentative -- has to do with the tobacco tax. The president would raise the tax or impose another levy to force up the price of cigarettes and help deter smoking. He would use the proceeds to help finance the increased child care subsidies and other new programs he proposes. The Senate Republicans, leery of the expansions of federal activity, would put all or most of the proceeds of the tax, if one is enacted, in reserve to pay future Medicare costs. In the interim, that would presumably mean using them, too, to pay down the debt. They would have a modest tax cut, paid for offsetting tax increases or spending cuts. The president would do that as well.

That sets up a fair enough debate -- "honorable," presidential adviser Gene Sperling has called it -- between the two uses of the money. To some extent it becomes a debate about which generation to assist. But it's a debate in which the country doesn't lose, no matter how it comes out. The problem in the big-deficit years of borrow-and-spend was that neither party was willing to moderate its programmatic objectives to achieve fiscal discipline. If both have now begun to do so, that's good news.