What's a few billion dollars in spending cuts when the nation is staring down decades of red ink? It's a good start, according to a new Heritage report on Congress's budget reconciliation bills. The House and Senate passed two very different bills, and conferees will soon hammer out a final version.

Through 2010, the House bill would cut spending by nearly $50 billion, and the Senate bill by $36 billion. Heritage analysts run through all the major proposals and tally the score for taxpayers. Heritage's compromise recommendations for conferees would bring $53 billion in savings. Add in proposals for Medicare, and that number jumps to nearly $100 billion.

The nation faces trillions of dollars in deficits in coming years. By trimming growth in mandatory spending a small amount, reconciliation would be a good first step on the road to fiscal sanity.

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Read Budget Reconciliation Guide for Conferees edited by Alison Acosta Fraser

A Summary of Recommendations

The Senate has enacted a tax package as part of reconciliation legislation, and the House is soon voting on its own version of a tax bill. This is generating considerable debate, though some of the discussion is a bit hyperbolic. In neither bill, for instance, is the tax relief very large.

When the federal government first sent men into space, it vowed to bring them all home safely. "Failure is not an option," flight director Gene Kranz famously told mission control when Apollo 13 was in danger.

NASA kept its promise and brought those three men home safely. But it's an open question whether Uncle Sam can keep another important promise: To provide for retirees through Social Security and Medicare. Once again, failure is "not an option," but it remains a possibility.