The House zipped through several key parts of President Bush’s tax-cut plan last week, clearing the way for its upcoming spring break. The comparison between this congressional haste and a collegiate road trip to Daytona is unavoidable.

The cut in the misnamed marriage penalty was a given, given the unpopularity of anything labeled as penalizing marriage. The $400 billion in legislation approved by the House – similar to a bill vetoed last year by President Clinton – addresses an anomaly in the tax code that forces about half of all married couples to pay more in taxes than if they were single by making the standard deduction for couples who don’t itemize twice the size of that for single taxpayers. The bill would also benefit the other half – couples who do not suffer a marriage penalty – because by 2009 it makes the bottom tax bracket for couples twice the size of the bracket for singles.

The House bill also increases the child tax credit, retroactive to this year, although it does make the credit less generous for the wealthy than President Bush wanted. On the other hand, the president wanted to limit relief from the marriage penalty only to two-paycheck couples hurt by it, while the House plan gives breaks to couples with nonworking spouses, on top of the $950 billion in income tax rate reductions already approved. Since all this adds up to something awfully close to the president’s $1.6-trillion total, the immediate $300 per taxpayer rebate the president said had to be tied to long-term relief now won’t happen at all.

Estate tax repeal didn’t fit either, at least in any recognizable form. Since total repeal, not just reform, was all that would do, and since the cost of repeal now appears to be three times the initial $192 -billion estimate, the House had to put the whole thing off until 2011. That is, Congress gets to claim estate tax repeal now, but taxpayers won’t see it for a decade, if ever.

These tax cuts – the revenue side of the budget equation – are expected to get a more thorough and deliberate going over by the evenly divided Senate in the weeks to come. That’s good because details about the other side – the department-by-department breakdown of the president’s spending plan – won’t be released until April 9 or later. That’s several days or more after spring break begins and the House will be long gone on a trip it began without a road map.