EJ Dionne's column on budget trade-offs and priorities is a good read. This president will defend tax cuts by any means necessary. It was one of those moments when a public official gives away a larger truth by offering what seems to be a throwaway line. Testifying this week on President Bush's budget, Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. suggested he would not mind a bit if the Democratic Congress added money to prevent cutbacks in coverage under the federal government's children's health insurance program.

A note on a budget meme that needs to be done in. The Washington Post: Some of its approaches, particularly the effort to restrain the growth of Medicare through additional means-testing and cutting payments to providers, are commendable; they merit more serious consideration by Congress than they appear destined to receive. The New York Times:

This just in, per today's CongressDaily ($): House Ways and Means Chairman Rangel said this afternoon he would move to break the House-Senate stalemate over minimum wage legislation by marking up a small business tax bill next Monday [which] he expects it to be "in the vicinity of $1 billion." It will also include about $1 billion in offsets to make it revenue neutral. Rangel insisted for weeks on passage of a "clean" minimum wage bill -- one containing no tax breaks. Today, Rangel insisted that he will not let his arm be twisted in conference negotiations over the size of the tax package.

In the Washington Post today, Ruth Marcus recognizes that Bush is relying on a tax increase via the AMT to claim that he can balance the budget without raising taxes. Looked at another way, what the Bush tax cuts give to taxpayers, the AMT grabs back. By 2012, if it isn't changed, the AMT would take back almost one-third of the Bush tax cuts...it would take back more than half of the tax cut for people making between $100,000 and $200,000.