Today marks the beginning of budget committee markups. Click here for the House Budget Committee Overview of the FY 2006 Budget Resolution. The Senate mark should be available later today. It appears today that House Republicans are planning to include approximately $48 billion in tax cuts in their budget resolution, while the Senate is supposedly planning to include around $70 billion. While these numbers are significantly lower than Bush's request, they are still extremely costly endeavors in a time when we are facing high cyclical deficits and proposing to cut spending for social programs significantly. A good editorial in today's Washington Post compares the Congressional Budget Committees' action of lowering the amount spent on tax cuts to "the restraint of a dieter who is accustomed to scarfing down three pies a day and wants applause for cutting back to one." This analogy is right on track. Any tax cuts pursued in this budget reconciliation process in conjunction with spending reductions in mandatory programs are costly and contradictory actions that use the guise of deficit reduction to further shrink the role of government and actually result in larger budget deficits. Click here and here for more information on the tax cuts. Click here for an informative Center on Budget and Policy Priorities report on CBO's recent preliminary analysis of the President's budget policy priorities.

Corporate special interests have a special relationship with this administration. Latest example: representatives of the retail industry had a private dinner with the chairman and two top officials of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the night before a hearing on a plan to require retailers to submit more information on a more frequent basis so that CPSC can turn consumer complaints into an early warning system. From the Washington Post:

Rep. John Boozman is expected to offer an amendment to the highway bill tomorrow. This Wal-Mart Amendment -- pushed by none other than Wal-Mart itself -- would allow corporate special interests to force truck drivers to work 16 hours a day, with no overtime.

Three items of importance: Last friday the Congressional Budget Office released an updated analysis of the President’s budget for fiscal year 2006, which includes an update of their baseline projections for the 2006-2015 period. In preparing this updated projection, they revised their estimates for Medicare spending. See this document, "Updated Estimates of Spending for Medicare," for details. The CBO's new spending estimate is an increase of almost 50 percent since their last estimate. Also of importance is today's news that the Senate will set a budget reconciliation tax figure of roughly $71 billion, which is down from the approximately $100 billion Bush proposed spending on tax cuts in his FY 06 budget proposal. See this OMB Watcher article for more information. Senate Republican budget writers are now saying this amount should be sufficient to cover the cost of extending expiring tax provisions through the five-year budget window; however this cost does not address the potential high costs of alternative minimum tax reform. These tax cuts, because they will be completed in reconciliation, will be given as instructions to the Finance Committee to undertake. Reconciliation bills are considered under expedited procedures in the Senate and cannot be filibustered. Finally, yesterday Senator Hegel (R-NE) introduced a Social Security bill that is based on the creation of private investment accounts. Like the White House, Hegel supports diverting four percentage points of payroll taxes to fund these accounts. Hegel's plan would allow workers under the age of 45 to divert part of their payroll tax contributions for these accounts. Read a transcript of Hegel's speech on his Social Security proposal here. Senate Minority Whip Durbin (D-IL) reiterated the Democratic leadership's stance on Social Security reform by calling any plan with privatization accounts "non-starters" on Meet the Press the other day. Click here for more information.