The purpose of the congressional budget process-and specifically the budget resolution-is to set an overall financial blueprint early in the congressional session to guide future spending decisions in the House and Senate on appropriations bills, tax legislation, and changes to mandatory spending programs such as Social Security and Medicare. While a budget resolution is non-binding and Congress is not required to stay within its limits, the majority party gains procedural protections during future debates on spending legislation if those measures stay within the budget caps set in the budget resolution (budget resolutions, it should be noted, are drafted by the White House but require congressional approval). To differentiate themselves with the majority party, minority party leaders often draft their own version of the budget resolution which accommodates their spending priorities. The subject of this vote was a budget resolution drafted by the Democratic leadership. If adopted, the Democratic leadership version of the budget resolution would have provided for a balanced budget by 2012, required domestic spending to keep pace with inflation, allowed for an extension of the $1000 child tax credit (which is essentially a tax cut for working families), reduced tax cuts for individuals who earn over $500,000 per year, and restored pay-as-you-go (PAYGO) rules to tax cut legislation in order to insure that revenue losses caused by tax cuts were offset by spending cuts or revenue increases in other areas of the budget. Progressives viewed the Democratic leadership's budget resolution as a fiscally responsible alternative to the Republican version. The Republican version of the budget resolution, Progressives argued, contained what they characterized as an excessive amount of tax cuts and an inadequate amount of funding to reduce the budget deficit. Progressives argued that after three years of tax cutting by Congress and the White House-tax cutting which has contributed to record high budget deficits and an additional $1.2 trillion to the nation's debt-it was now time to restore some fiscal discipline in government. Conservatives voted against the Democratic leadership's budget resolution on the grounds that it failed to provide enough tax cuts, domestic spending reductions, and funding increases to the military. On a party line vote of 194-232, the Democratic leadership's budget resolution was sunk and the spending priorities contained within it were not incorporated into the Republican version of the budget resolution.