TIME Magazine reporter Mike Allen writes in this week's edition that any significant tax reform attempts are likely to be postponed until at least 2007. Allen says: Bush aides tell TIME that the President is likely to postpone any big push for comprehensive tax reform--which looked like it would be a centerpiece of next year's agenda--until '07 or '08. In the meantime, he will probably start small by mentioning the issue in the State of the Union and other addresses next year.

House conferees to the Labor/HHS appropriations bill met last night to made adjustments to the conference report that was rejected by the full House on November 17. The conferees agreed to increase funding for rural health care programs by about $90 million and remove a provision barring coverage of erectile dysfunction drugs such as Viagra through Medicare.

The House passed a number of tax bills yesterday. In total, they voted to trim $94.5 billion from federal revenue over five years. As Concord Coalition executive director Robert Bixby aptly put it in this Washington Post article, "I don't think it makes any sense to go through all the difficulty they just went through with the budget-cutting bill, then give it all back in tax cuts. If they want to cut taxes, fine, but they are going to have to cut spending by at least that much to help the deficit, and clearly they are not willing to do that. They have to start looking reality in the face."

The reconciliation process Congress is currently still entangled in was laid out in the budget resolution to include three components: one cutting the budget, one cutting taxes, and the third increasing the debt limit. It appears now that Congress will delay increasing the debt limit until February 2006.