Senate Budget Committee chair Kent Conrad (D-ND) provided reporters with some details yesterday about the budget resolution draft that his committee will mark up today and tomorrow. Some features are good news:

• priorities -- Conrad's draft provides a $16-18 billion increase in domestic appropriations over Bush's proposal for FY 2008, with substantial increases in education, veterans, and community policing programs, and, on the mandatory spending side, $50 billion for SCHIP over the next five years
• surplus projections -- Conrad projects a federal budget surplus of $132 billion in FY 2012 and, unlike Bush, acknowledges the difficulty of reaching his goal since, given PAYGO constraints, extending the Bush 2001 and 2003 tax cuts and halting AMT's expansion will have to be offset to the tune of $800 billion in new revenues

Some features are no better than the Bush budget:

• assumptions -- Conrad conveniently assumes the exact same five-year levels of Iraq war spending as Bush does, which is ironic, since Conrad criticized Bush for "fail[ing] to include full out-year war costs"; he also assumes that, after a two-year patch, AMT revenues would continue to roll in, unabated (the second patch year may afford time for AMT reform)
• punting on tough choices -- Conrad identifies offsets for only $15 billion out the $50 billion he provides for SCHIP, relying on a "reserve fund" (a kind of "offset-to-be-named-later") to make up the difference down the road, with a much bigger reserve fund to pay for the Bush tax cuts, to the extent they are extended

Many important elements of the mark -- revenue projections, discretionary spending caps, instructions to committees -- await disclosure when the Budget Committee meets to consider it later today.