This year's budget battles will look similar to last year's.

This year's budget battles will look similar to last year's. Once again, the most pressing concern will be funding the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The war supplemental will again be unpopular with both parties. Republicans and conservative Democrats will resist the timetables for withdrawal that Pelosi and Harry Reid will inevitably attempt to incorporate into the bill, whereas white-flag Democrats will not want to authorize another dime for the war under any conditions. The Democratic leadership will try to buy votes from these recalcitrant constituencies by adding unrelated spending to the supplementals. Thus, conservatives' most important objective in this fight will be to make sure that military commanders have everything they need to prosecute the wars successfully, but a secondary objective will be to keep the Democrats from using troops as pack mules for pork. A longer-term concern, for the second year in a row, is that the Democrats have put forward a five-year budget proposal that assumes the expiration of the Bush tax cuts. Allowing rates to snap back to their previous levels would raise taxes by two-thirds of $1 trillion, which would be the largest tax increase in American history. Some kinds of "change" we don't need.