All Talk, No Game on Discretionary Limits

There have been a lot of numbers thrown around with regards budget resolutions, deeming resolutions, and discretionary spending limits. To keep it simple, we've put the numbers for a bunch of different proposals below (hat tip to our colleague Jason Delisle with the Federal Education Budget Project at the New America Foundation for putting together these numbers).

^{*To compare on an apples-to-apples basis, war spending was removed and Pell grants were added to the discretionary category in the President's budget. The actual budget removes Pell grants from discretionary and puts them in mandatory.}

^{Note: House Blue Dog numbers aren't here because they haven't provided complete numbers for discretionary spending.}

Notice how with the exception of Sessions-McCaskill, all these resolutions represent increases from the FY 2011 levels in the 2010 budget resolution. And at a time when lawmakers are trying to claim the mantle of "fiscal responsibility."