The lead editorial in the much-read Sunday New York Times yesterday, The Budget Illusion, cites last week's CBO projections of a cumulative deficit of $2.9 trillion to $3.4 trillion over the next 10 years "if, as Mr. Bush wishes, the tax cuts are extended beyond their scheduled expiration in 2010." It concludes: Mr. Bush’s tax cuts should largely be allowed to expire. Facing that truth is not a fiscal challenge, it’s a political one. Mr. Bush will not meet it. But a future president and Congress will have to.

The Senate has been making no concessions to the shortness of life in its deliberations on S. 2, the minimum wage bill.

Congressional Democrats have taken steps to end the IRS program that privatizes tax collection, GovExec reports today. The House bill (H.R. 695), offered by Reps. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., and Steve Rothman, D-N.J., would repeal the authority Congress granted the IRS in 2004 to outsource some tax debt collections. The Senate measure, from Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., and Patty Murray, D-Wash., orders the suspension of an IRS program to use private collectors, and would block funds for the initiative.

Next week, House appropriators plan to introduce the full-year extension of the continuing resolution that funds about half of all discretionary programs. The $463 billion bill may shuffle some money around to fill growing funding gaps, but some programs are bound to take hits under the tight budget cap that the last Congress imposed.