In the same Bloomberg BusinessWeek interview in which he compared Wall Street bonuses to extravagant professional baseball salaries, President Obama said that he wants his proposed fiscal commission — which would be charged with determining ways to reduce long-term deficits — to consider all options, adding that he wants to be “completely agnostic” regarding what it considers:

“The whole point of it is to make sure that all ideas are on the table,” the president said…“So what I want to do is to be completely agnostic, in terms of solutions”…“What I can’t do is to set the thing up where a whole bunch of things are off the table,” Obama said. “Some would say we can’t look at entitlements. There are going to be some that say we can’t look at taxes, and pretty soon, you just can’t solve the problem.”

This has led to predictable crows of victory from the right-wing, which is taking Obama’s statement as an admission that he is backtracking on his campaign pledge not to raise taxes for any household making less than $250,000 per year. “I’m sure you remember this pledge, and how there were no hedges, no exceptions, no ‘maybes’ in his promise on the campaign trail,” wrote the National Review’s Jim Geraghty.

As far as critiques go, this is pretty weak sauce. For one thing, the budget that the administration submitted earlier this month kept tax rates steady for the middle class, just as Obama promised. So it’s not like his legislative proposals aren’t reflecting his pledge.

What Obama is really doing is refusing to engage in the fantasy-land approach to deficits that the right-wing has been pushing. Ever since the creation of a deficit commission became a distinct possibility, conservatives have been advocating that the commission be explicitly barred from considering tax increases of any kind. Seven Republican senators who co-sponsored the Conrad-Gregg legislation to create a commission wound up voting against it because they decided at the last second that they wanted a commission that would only consider spending.

Counting on a commission to come up with ways to address the deficit is an already dubious way to cope with the problem, as it simply inserts more veto points into a dysfunctional congressional process. To rule something off the table before the process even begins makes it that much harder. As Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH) put it, “the point here is that neither side is going to come to the table on this unless everybody is at the table. If I say no taxes on the table, why would anybody on the other side come to the table?”

And the simple point remains: long-term deficits can’t be fixed on the spending side alone. Dealing with long-term health care costs, as well as finding ways to raise revenue, have to be part of the solution. It seems to me that Obama understands and simply doesn’t want to undercut the work of the commission before it even begins.

There has been a lot of consternation recently regarding the Obama administration’s continuing commitment to allow the Bush tax cuts to expire for the wealthiest American households. House Democrats are pushing to leave “well-enough alone for now” — with Rep. Mike McMahon (D-NY) even saying that those making $250,000 per year are “barely making ends meet” — while Republicans are trying to convince the President to “back off the marginal rate tax hikes.”

But today the administration’s Council of Economic Advisers released its annual Economic Report of the President, which bolsters the case for allowing the cuts to expire. For instance, the report notes that “in recent years nearly half of all income — including both wages and salaries and nonlabor income — has gone to 10 percent of families. The top 1 percent of families now receive nearly 25 percent of income, up from less than 10 percent in the 1970s.”

And at the same time that more and more income has become concentrated at the top of the scale, tax rates on the highest earners have been falling.

In the 2010 fiscal year, the Bush tax cuts will actually give millionaires more in tax breaks than 90 percent of Americans will earn in income. So the result of all of this is “a compression in the tax burdens applied to taxpayers with different incomes — the difference between the average tax rates on high-income groups and those on middle-class households is narrower than at any other time in modern history.”

And it’s not as if the administration is proposing any sort of radical tax increase. The expiration — which is a part of current law, mind you — merely returns tax rates for the highest earners to the level at which they were in the 1990′s, which is still far below their historical level. If we want to seriously address long-term deficits, which we have to in order to keep the country in some semblance of fiscal shape, revenue increases have to be part of the equation, and it makes sense to both look to where the money is and to address historic levels of income inequality and a shifting tax burden.