SCHIP, a federal health insurance program for low-income children and pregnant women, has been making news lately (CQ ($) has a good article on it). Here's a quick rundown of what's been happening:

Linda Beale, law professor at Wayne State University Law School, provides a much more detailed rejoinder to the Wall Street Journal piece, Bill Clinton's AMT Bomb," than we could in our blog yesterday. Her main points are as follows:

• The 2001-2006 tax cuts passed by the Republican-dominated Congress and the Bush Administration were packaged with no plan to repeal the AMT, since AMT revenues were needed to pretend that the tax cut package was considerably cheaper than it was known to be

Rep. David Wu and Bruce Ackerman have an interesting proposal on war funding. They want to put a cap on the total amount of funding for the Iraq war. It is Congress's job to restore fiscal balance first, by placing an overall limit on Iraq war expenditures. Congress should limit this president to spending half a trillion dollars on the Iraq war -- and no more.

The fiscal gap is an awful way to measure and think about the budget's long-term fiscal imbalance. I don't know why, but GAO likes it. They gave a rundown of what the fiscal gap is in a report released on Friday. The fiscal gap is the amount of spending reduction or tax increases needed to keep debt as a share of gross domestic product (GDP) at or below today's ratio. Another way to say this is that the fiscal gap is the amount of change needed to prevent the kind of debt explosion implicit in figure 3.