By the time Congress left town for Easter recess last week, both the House and the Senate had adopted Fiscal Year 2008 federal budget resolutions. The two resolutions were remarkably similar and, in fact, closely tracked the budget proposed by President Bush in early February. All three budgets called for about $2.9 trillion in spending next year. They all claimed to produce surpluses by the year 2012. The spending increases they proposed in the next fiscal year were all within four percent of each other in real terms. And none called for tax increases.

There were two notable differences. First, the president’s budget assumed that Congress would enact new legislation to extend all of the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts, whereas the House and Senate plans assume that they would expire in 2011, as the law current reads. Second, both the House and Senate resolutions propose a pay-as-you-go (or PAYGO) rule requiring that new entitlement spending or tax cuts would need to be "deficit neutral," that is, paid for by offsetting tax increases or spending cuts. The president's budget does not.

Nothing about these differences implies that either the president or Congress must increase taxes in order to yield a budget surplus by 2012. And yet a chorus has arisen from the administration and GOP members of Congress that the Democrats’ plans amounted to "the largest tax increase in American history," in the words of Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), the top Republican on the House Budget Committee. “Yesterday, Democrats voted to impose the largest tax hike in American history,” echoed GOP House leader John Boehner (R-OH).

This is an ironic canard, in view of the fact that the president’s budget assumes the extension of his tax cuts, leaving the Treasury with about $400 billion less in revenues by 2012 than the Democrats’ budgets do. And yet he claims that he can produce a budget surplus that year without letting his tax cuts expire.

A budget resolution is, of course, only a guideline - a roadmap for the budget, not a statute that would have the force of law. Nothing in it is ultimately binding. Resolutions do not raise taxes – only legislation passed by Congress and signed by the president can do so.

In fact, the Republican bellyaching has nothing to do with their imagined Democratic plans, which actually call for an extension of a huge swath of the Bush cuts that benefit middle-class taxpayers. Rather, it reflects the GOP dismay with the Democrats’ self-imposed budget constraints in the PAYGO rule. This rule makes extending the Bush tax cuts harder to do, because they would have to be paid for. As Robert S. McIntyre, director of Citizens for Tax Justice says: “That’s why they want to exempt their new tax cuts from the PAYGO rules. In other words, what they really want is the biggest deficit increase in history.”

Yes, under PAYGO, the Democrats will need to find a way to pay for the middle class tax cuts they intend to extend. But there are many ways to skin that cat, for example, by collecting the estimated $345 billion in revenue lost annually to tax evaders, or cracking down on offshore tax shelters, or hiking user fees, or selling broadband, or any of a number of ways that do not involve tax increases. As both Senate and House Budget Committee chairs Kent Conrad (D-ND) and John Spratt (D-SC) have said of their resolutions, respectively, “It includes no tax increases,” and “There is nothing in here that raises taxes.”

Of course, the Republicans themselves have always known that the Bush tax cuts would expire in 2011 and that the higher, pre-2001 tax rates would return that year, adding about $400 billion by 2012 - or at least they should have known - they wrote the law. If that $400 billion amounts to the largest tax increase in history, it is the Republicans who are responsible for it. In the years since the current law was enacted, when they controlled both the White House and Congress, they never saw fit to prevent that increase from occurring by extending current law. Why now do they resort to scare tactics about large tax increases? Maybe they should ask themselves why they didn't act then, or how President Bush proposes to extend his tax cuts and produce a surplus by 2012 – without the largest tax increase in history.