The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget is a pretty low-key group. But with a board of directors as diverse as former OMB Director David Stockman and former House Budget Chairman Bill Gray, D-Pa., when the group talks, it's probably worthwhile listening to them a bit. Maybe more than a bit.

So budget writers might want to pay some attention to the committee's evaluation of Senate Budget Chairman Gregg's "Stop Over Spending Act of 2006," released last week. The title of the report pretty much sums it up: "A Good Start in Need of Balance."

You remember Gregg's plan: It's the budget overhaul proposal that includes line-item enhanced rescission, budget caps, sequestration, biennial budgeting, commissions, the kitchen sink, 2007 draft picks and a provision to be named later. Being the purists that they are, members of the Committee would much rather see Congress make the policy changes needed to bring the budget back to balance than adopt new rules.

"But given the polarized partisan environment and that it is an election year, improvements to budget process may be the best we can hope for," they said.

The Gregg plan includes specific deficit targets enforced by law, and the Committee is happy about that. However, it warns that the targets do not take into account the effect of economic and technical factors that it should do. The plan is out of balance, the Committee contends, because "automatic reductions would be applied on the spending side of the budget no matter what accounted for the failure to meet the deficit targets."

Do we smell some bias toward tax cuts in the Republican proposal? Nah, not possible. The Responsible Budget folks applaud Gregg and Co. for calling for statutory spending caps similar to those that had been in effect in the past. Spending caps work, they say, but only if they are set at a reasonable level. (Indeed, for several years, Congress approved budget resolutions containing artificially low targets to make members look like tightwads and then used every backdoor budget scheme and gimmic k to pay for programs in the appropriations process.)"As we saw in the 1990s, reasonable caps can be extremely effective; unreasonable ones are routinely ignored, contributing to the breakdown of the process," the Committee said. ...

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