This week, Congress sets out to craft a "budget resolution" – a blueprint for government spending and tax policy for the 2009 fiscal year ahead and an institutional reply to the proposed budget for the year that the president submitted to Congress last month. The House and Senate Budget Committees take the first step in the coming days, beginning debate on a draft budget or "mark" produced by the budget committees chairs, in the painstaking task that they hope will result in the FY09 Budget Resolution.

What is a Budget Resolution? Does it produce any meaningful results? What does a credible, useful Budget Resolution look like? Will we get one this year? Here's what we should look for in the Budget Resolution process this year.

The Budget Resolution is a quasi-legislative product called a joint resolution. It serves as a blueprint for Congress for the upcoming fiscal year and the four fiscal years that follow. The Budget Resolution provides legislative guidelines for the overall federal budget, including:

* Budget authority levels, with spending broken down by budget function
* An overall discretionary spending cap
* Levels of federal revenues
* Deficit/surplus target amounts and debt-level limit legislation
* Any economic assumptions on which targets amounts are based
* Instructions to committees to change authorizing legislation in order to meet these levels and amounts

The Budget Resolution receives nearly a week of committee attention and often as much House and Senate floor consideration. And it is probably the most powerful amendment magnet debated each year. Yet it has no binding statutory authority, does not carry the force of law, and is not signed by the president There is no actual requirement that Congress actually adopt such a resolution. It merely sets out general spending and tax goals and instructions for the authorizing committees, which would need to pass any compliance or enacting legislation separately.

In recent years, both the president's proposed budgets and the Congress' Budget Resolutions have been built around one Archimedean policy point: producing a balanced budget as soon as humanly possible. Year after year for most of the decade, amid tax cuts and spending increases, the prospects for a return to the surplus of FY 2001 (the final Clinton-era budget) has receded further back on the budget's five-year time horizon.

The president's proposed budgets both last year and this one purported to yield a balanced budget by 2012. Last year's Budget Resolution did likewise, and Congress is expected to aim for this date again this year. But both budgets rely on achieving this goal on far-fetched assumptions. One assumption, for example, is that in FY 2012 and FY 2013, there will be no cost whatsoever for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and other overseas activities related to the global war on terror. Another is that the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) will not be "patched" again this year, meaning that 38 million households would have to pay it next year (compared to about four million households today).

The persistent re-appearance of unrealistic balanced budget targets in the presidential or congressional five-year projections – in the face of political and fiscal facts – disinclines budget-making participants and observers from taking these documents seriously.

Even so, one number in the president's budget proposal and the Budget Resolution becomes a signal frame of reference, a focal point by which the relative "success" of the budget-making parties is measured: their respective top-line discretionary spending figures. The president and Congress carefully calibrate the optimal figure, weighing its fiscal and political impact. In particular, the domestic non-homeland security top-line discretionary figure sets the basic spending parameters for much of the budget debate that ensues.

The president's top-line figure this year proposes a cut in funding for domestic programs estimated at between $12.8 billion and $20.5 billion below the 2008 level, adjusted for inflation. This top-line will no doubt provoke House and Senate Budget Resolution drafts to restore this funding and then some – so expect another stand-off this year with Bush, who has already promised to veto spending bills that exceed his requests.

Finally, there is an element of the Budget Resolution that is more than just "wish-list" directions to various authorizing committees. The resolution may include what are called "reconciliation instructions," which are binding on the committees. These are very specific tax and spending prescriptions that are protected from filibuster and must, in the aggregate, be "revenue-positive," i.e., reduce the fiscal year's deficit.

Including instructions that mandate a fully paid-for AMT patch, a supplemental stimulus package, expansion of the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), and more infrastructure spending in the Budget Resolution is tempting, since these instructions are rare filibuster-proof opportunities to accomplish such goals. But they are risky, too, since they invite germane counter-instructions – perhaps to make the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts permanent or to repeal the estate tax – which could be added by a simple majority vote.

Because of the issues above, and because Fiscal Year 2009 will occur mostly during the next president's first year in office, almost no one expects Congress and the president to agree on an FY 09 budget. Instead, expect a debate that showcases the parties' budget priorities and provides a sneak preview of the fiscal policy priorities they are likely to campaign on in the fall elections.