Obama’s punt on the budget

That pretty much describes the American mindset when it comes to our country’s long-term federal budget deficit. Everyone wants it addressed — but in a way that won’t affect their programs or increase their taxes.

It would be gratifying to say that President Obama used this week’s budget release to bravely explain that our large fiscal challenges will require widespread sacrifices. Gratifying, but untrue. Obama’s budget was at best a small step toward fiscal realism.

“It is not a bold plan,’’ said Isabel Sawhill, an associate director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Clinton and now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “This is so important that he should have spent more political capital on putting forward some bigger ideas.’’

“It indicates that we are shifting gears, but in a very modest way,’’ said Robert Reischauer, president of the Urban Institute and former director of the Congressional Budget Office.

Here’s the best indication of that: Despite its optimistic assumptions and magic asterisks, Obama’s spending blueprint will still result in $7.2 trillion in new borrowing, atop our current publicly held debt of about $10 trillion, over the next 10 years.

The truth is, we can’t make serious progress on deficit reduction without trimming entitlements, particularly Medicare and Medicaid, and raising substantially more revenue. Put another way, this country won’t solve its long-term fiscal problems if deficit-reduction efforts are focused largely on nondefense discretionary spending, which is only about 12 percent of the federal budget, and if 98 percent of Americans are exempt from any tax increases, as Obama promised in his presidential campaign.

Republicans, of course, are willing to reform entitlements, but won’t concede the need for new revenue, even though the Bush tax cuts helped create our long-term structural imbalance. For his part, Obama is more than willing to look to upper earners for new revenue; he (eventually) wants to return income tax rates for the well-to-do to their pre-2001 levels, for example, while limiting the value of their itemized deductions.

But Obama hasn’t spoken a tough budgetary truth to the middle class: They are getting a lot more government than they are paying for, and that’s got to change.

“His no new taxes on incomes under $250,000 is more than a kissing cousin of George [H.W.] Bush’s ‘Read my lips, no new taxes,’ ’’ noted Reischauer. “There is no way we are going to be able to resolve the challenge ahead of us without raising taxes on a broad segment of the American population — and sooner or later, policy-makers are going to have to admit that.’’

Yesterday, the president made it clear that he’s not eager to lead on essential tasks such as entitlement reform, but instead wants to proceed in concert with congressional Republicans. (The president is clearly hoping that as we go forward, voters will blanch at the consequences of the GOP’s spending-cuts-only approach.)

One can certainly understand the political attraction of that less risky road.

The problem, however, is that most voters have little sense of the relative size of the various components of the federal budget and, further, haven’t had to mull what government programs are really worth to them.

Instead, we’ve grown accustomed to government largesse brought to us by the next generation of taxpayers, who will someday have to repay the debt we’re running up. Although one would hope more Americans would be willing to sacrifice to avoid burdening their kids in that fashion, so far that really hasn’t been the case.

Perhaps a sense of intergenerational responsibility will take hold as the debate progresses. Yet that’s considerably less likely if Obama abdicates one of the most important roles a president can play: That of the nation’s educator-in-chief.

Scot Lehigh can be reached at lehigh@globe.com.