These are excerpts from recent editorials in newspapers in the United States and abroad:

The Lima (Ohio) News, on funding the Iraq war (March 29):

Congress, by a 50-48 vote in the Senate and a 218-212 margin in the House, passed a bill that attaches a timetable for withdrawal to a $124 billion funding bill for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The two versions will be reconciled before being sent to the White House. President Bush has vowed to veto any bill with a deadline for withdrawal, and neither house is likely to muster a two-thirds majority to override a veto.

Still, these bills are an important milestone. Democrats believe they owe their majority in Congress to discontent with an increasingly unpopular war, and they have translated that discontent into a plan of their own.

An honest assessment must include the very real possibility that a US withdrawal will be followed by a period of bloodletting in Iraq. But the costs of leaving must be balanced against the costs of staying with little chance of improving conditions. The cost to taxpayers is some $8 billion per month and rising. The cost in American lives is now about 800 a year and likely to rise. Even a superpower cannot maintain such a commitment indefinitely.

The Greenville (South Carolina) News, on war funding (April 3)>

A supplemental spending bill to fund the war in Iraq deserves a veto from President Bush for two reasons: It contains an ill-conceived deadline to bring home American troops, and it is loaded with pork-barrel spending that has no place in supplemental war appropriations legislation.

Telling the enemy when the US forces will leave a war zone sends a message to the terrorists and Iraqi insurgents they have won and need to hold out for another year to be rid of American forces. Putting such a light at the end of the tunnel would endanger US forces.

There is a time and place for every debate in Congress. That includes the unrelated spending in the Iraq funding bill, and the idea of bringing the troops home. But neither of those issues belong in the war appropriations bill, which should be about supplying the troops and nothing else.

The Star-Ledger, Newark, New Jersey, on the federal budget (April 3B>

It's budget season in Washington, and this year there is some welcome substance to the usual prattle about fiscal discipline and responsibility.

Democrats in both the House and the Senate are making a pay-as-you-go mandate central to their $2.9 trillion budget plans, meaning any spending increases or tax cuts have to be paid for either with spending cuts or tax increases.

This sensible principle helped balance the budget in the 1990s but quickly disappeared during the first Bush administration. Republicans chopped taxes, raised spending and went to war in both Afghanistan and Iraq. The result? A national debt that has careened toward a vertiginous $9 trillion.

The Democrats' budget plans have other flaws, including relying on questionable future surpluses to pay for expanded children's health insurance as well as accepting, for accounting purposes, the president's wishful idea that Iraq and Afghanistan war spending will total only $50 billion in 2009.

But the party's decision to restore pay-go, as it's known, as a central pillar of the budget process is a real and important first step toward getting the federal deficit back under control.