Obama on the deficit

President Obama has finally decided to take his own side in the budget debate, laying out his principles, arguing that the roots of our fiscal problems lie in the tax cuts of the last decade that we could not afford.

And he raised the stakes in our politics to something more fundamental than dry numbers.

There are at least four things to like about his approach.

First, without mentioning Rep. Paul Ryan by name, he called out Ryan's truly reactionary budget proposal for what it is: an effort to slash government programs, in large part to preserve and expand tax cuts for the wealthy.

"That's not right," he said, "and it's not going to happen as long as I'm president."

Second, he was willing to speak plainly about raising taxes, and he insisted correctly on restoring the Clinton-era tax rates for the wealthy.

Third, he was right to focus on the need to cut security spending. Any serious effort to reduce the deficit cannot exempt defense.

There are two ways to reduce the government's heath care expenses. One is Ryan's path, which, Obama said, "lowers the government's health care bills by asking seniors and poor families to pay them instead."

The alternative, which the president rightly embraced, "lowers the government's health care bills by reducing the cost of health care itself."

But a good speech is only a first step.

For his allies, the president's negotiating method has been, well, petrifying: concede, concede and concede again -- and then compromise from an already heavily compromised position.

That's why his promised cuts in domestic spending straight out of the box are worrying.

And there is something fundamentally wrong about making the deficit the central issue in our politics. Here's a little secret: The deficit is actually not a hard problem.

Only the taxophobia that Republicans have created and Democrats cower before has made this so complicated. Yes, health care costs are also a big deal.

But they are a challenge for the whole economy, and too many conservatives demagogue all serious efforts to grapple with them (see "death panels").

For all that, there was a bigness about Obama's speech that was a relief after his recent sojourn as a sideline judge.

"We believe that in order to preserve our own freedoms and pursue our own happiness, we can't just think about ourselves," he said.