The core of the president’s plan totals just more than $2 trillion in deficit reduction over 10 years. It combines the new taxes with $580 billion in cuts to mandatory benefit programs, including $248 billion from Medicare.

The administration also counts savings of $1 trillion over 10 years from the withdrawal of troops from Iraq and Afghanistan.

The deficit reduction plan represents an economic bookend to the $447 billion in tax cuts and new public works spending that Obama has proposed as a short-term measure to stimulate the economy and create jobs. He’s submitting his deficit fighting plan to a special joint committee of Congress that is charged with recommending deficit reductions of up to $1.5 trillion over 10 years.

In a defiant note, administration officials made clear Sunday that Obama would veto any Medicare benefit cuts that aren’t paired with tax increases on upper-income people.

Officials cast Obama’s plan as his vision for deficit reduction, and distinguished it from the negotiations he had with Boehner in July as Obama sought to avoid a government default.

As a result, it includes no changes in Social Security and no increase in the Medicare eligibility age, which the president had been willing to accept this summer.

Moreover, the new tax revenue Obama is seeking is nearly double the $800 billion that Boehner had been willing to consider in July. Republicans were already lining up against the president’s tax proposal before they even knew the magnitude of what he intended to recommend.

“Class warfare may make for really good politics but it makes for rotten economics,” GOP Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, the House Budget Committee chairman, said Sunday in reaction to one Obama tax proposal to impose a minimum tax rate on wealthy filers.

Former President Bill Clinton on Monday dismissed GOP claims that the tax on the wealthy would discourage jobs creation and hamper economic growth.

“Republicans in Washington always say the same thing,” Clinton said on NBC’s “Today” show. He called their argument an insult to wealthy Americans, including many who don’t mind paying more.

Key features of Obama’s plan, as described by senior administration officials Sunday evening:

–$1.5 trillion in new revenue, which would include about $800 billion realized over 10 years from repealing the Bush-era tax rates for couples making more than $250,000. It also would place limits on deductions for wealthy filers and end certain corporate loopholes and subsidies for oil and gas companies.

–$580 billion in cuts in mandatory benefit programs, including $248 billion in Medicare and $72 billion in Medicaid and other health programs. Other mandatory benefit programs include farm subsidies.

–$430 billion in savings from lower interest payment on the national debt.

By adding about $1 trillion in spending cuts already enacted by Congress and counting about $1 trillion in savings from the drawdown of military forces from Iraq and Afghanistan, the combined deficit reduction would total more than $4 trillion over 10 years, senior administration officials said.

Republicans have ridiculed the war savings as gimmicky, but House Republicans included them in their budget proposal this year and Boehner had agreed to count them as savings during debt ceiling negotiations with the president this summer.

Obama backed away from proposing sweeping changes to Medicare, following the advice of fellow Democrats that it would only give political cover to a privatization plan supported by House Republicans that turned to be unpopular with older Americans.

Administration officials said 90 percent of the $248 billion in 10-year Medicare cuts would be squeezed from service providers. The plan does shift some additional costs to beneficiaries, but those changes would not start until 2017.

Illustrating Obama’s populist pitch on tax revenue, one proposal would set a minimum tax on taxpayers making $1 million or more in income. The measure — Obama is going to call it the “Buffett Rule” for billionaire investor Warren Buffett — is designed to prevent millionaires from taking advantage of lower tax rates on investment earnings than what middle-income taxpayers pay on their wages.

At issue is the difference between a taxpayer’s tax bracket and the effective tax rate that taxpayer pays. Millionaires face a 35 percent tax bracket, while middle income filers fall in the 15 or 25 percent bracket. But investment income is taxed at 15 percent and Buffett has complained that he and other wealthy people have been “coddled long enough” and shouldn’t be paying a smaller share of their income in federal taxes than middle-class taxpayers.

Associated Press writer Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar contributed to this report.

Politically, the idea was to apply pressure by threatening the unthinkable, i.e., “We’ll shoot the hostage.” Either the supercommittee will cut a deal, or the defense budget gets whacked.

It is not going to happen that way.

First, the supercommittee is bound to fail; it will reach no meaningful budget agreement.

Second, when the committee fails, the defense cuts envisioned by the supposedly automatic trigger mechanism will not occur. That will be for the simple reason that almost no one wants that to happen. While they are quite mistaken about the consequences, almost everyone on Capitol Hill (and in the Pentagon) thinks that those defense reductions will be “devastating,” “disastrous,” “doomsday” and any other apocalyptic term you can think of.

In short, the debt deal took a hostage that no one wants to shoot.

In the 31 years I worked on Capitol Hill, I came to know several others with as much, or more, experience as I in understanding how the place operates. Not one of the four Hill veterans (with a collective 150 years of House-Senate experience) with whom I have spoken believes that the supercommittee is headed for anything but failure. The debt deal and the committee were designed only to kick the can down the road to get us past last summer’s crisis — with the inevitable result of provoking other crises.

The meetings held thus far by the supercommittee have made obvious its inevitable breakdown. At a hearing this week with the director of the Congressional Budget Office, Douglas Elmendorf (who conducted himself with professionalism and grace), the congressional members demonstrated why the vast majority of Americans hold them in contempt.

Consisting mostly of second-stringers on budget issues and leadership errand boys (and girl) from their party caucuses, that bunch will find a $1.2 trillion budget solution sometime after pigs fly and shrimps whistle.

The real budget action on Capitol Hill is occurring behind closed doors. The defense subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee met on Tuesday, in private, to decide on the 2012 Department of Defense Appropriations Bill. It funds most, but not all, of the Pentagon’s budget. The subcommittee took cognizance of the initial mandatory cuts required by the debt deal, but not any parts that had to do with the supercommittee and the automatic cuts.

The Aug. 2 deal imposed — without any further palaver required — an initial phase of reductions on appropriations for the next 10 years totaling over $900 billion. While the precise budget obligation on the Pentagon in this first phase has not been entirely clear, most are now interpreting it to mean a $350 billion reduction. That means that the Pentagon budget would be effectively frozen at its current, fiscal year 2011 level — precisely the level set by the Appropriations Committee’s bill.

It safely can be predicted this will be the level of Pentagon spending the entire Congress endorses for 2012, after some theatrical grumbling by some Republicans about the bill’s spending being $26 billion less than President Obama’s now meaningless budget request from last February.

Even at the 2011 level, the bill is extremely generous. The amount — about $529 billion after separate military construction and some other pieces are added — will be almost as much “base” spending as the Pentagon has seen in any single year for decades.

If you add the separate funding for the wars in Afghanistan and elsewhere ($118 billion), the amount is quite close to the Pentagon’s highest level since the end of World War II — and it is well above previous secondary peaks attained in the Korean and Vietnamese Wars and Ronald Reagan’s fleeting zenith in 1985.

That “frozen” 2011 level will be more than twice the combined defense budgets of China, Russia, Iran, Syria, Cuba and Somalia. It will be more than $80 billion more than we spent, on average, during the Cold War when we faced a threatening and heavily armed Soviet Union and a hostile, dogmatically communist China. In the absence of these two huge threats, we are now being told we need to spend more.

While the new DOD appropriations bill was described by its architect, Sen. Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii, as “not an easy allocation to meet,” it is actually a defense budget quite flush with money.

The bill includes several gimmicks to permit higher spending than is apparent. There is the clumsy ploy of moving $6.5 billion out of the capped part of the Pentagon budget that the debt deal limited and adding the money back into the separate (uncapped) funding for the war in Afghanistan. (This, of course, permitted the “base” bill to contain $6.5 billion more than otherwise.)

Also, as the details trickle out next week, we will find the usual ruses, including cuts for “revised economic assumptions,” “unobligated balances” and other phony games to pretend the committee is reducing money (rather than deferring it) and making good government decisions (rather than taking capricious cuts in military readiness while protecting procurement — and contractors). (For more on these tricks, see here.)

The current defense bill is not a tough-minded but moderate action to impose restraint on the Pentagon; it is an effort to protect Pentagon spending as much as possible. With Robert Gates taking the lead and Leon Panetta bobble-heading in agreement, the Pentagon has resolved itself to that first phase of $350 billion in cuts over 10 years. They are not happy about it, but they will live with it in order to fend off further reductions. The Senate Appropriations Committee leadership is in deep sympathy with that sentiment.

Filled with bunkum to make it seem as if it’s cutting at least moderately but is actually rescuing the unaffordable, underperforming F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, the bill from the Senate Appropriations Committee is a rear-guard budget protection action.

The gambit will be successful. The chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Rep. Buck McKeon, R-Calif., is quoted almost every day about the cataclysm that will occur if the defense budget is cut at all. This kind of hysteria makes the assertions of Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., almost seem to be the middle ground: He threatened to quit the supercommittee if the Pentagon cuts go beyond the initial $350 billion. The response from Democrats and even Republicans who have previously favored meaningful Pentagon cuts has sealed the deal: They have been completely silent.

All that remains to be done is to let the supercommittee proceed on its clear path to failure. That will trigger the dreaded automatic cuts, but only nominally. As designed, those cuts would not occur until 2013. The big defense spender types will have all of 2012 to trash any opponents who dare to speak in favor of allowing them. They will use their traditional slander that to be against bloat in the defense budget is to be “anti-defense.” It has always worked in the past, especially with Democrats who want to posture themselves as moderate, such as candidate Obama.

The debt deal will be rewritten. The defense budget will be “saved,” and the next budget crisis will be made both inevitable and worse. We have a lot more dysfunction in Congress and the White House yet to observe.

Winslow T. Wheeler worked on Capitol Hill for 31 years; he handled national security issues for both Republicans and Democrats in the Senate and the Government Accountability Office. He is the editor of the new anthology “The Pentagon Labyrinth: 10 Short Essays to Help You Through It,” available online here. 

But, in the words of Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan, “Democracy is not a game.” The committee’s choices will set the nation’s fiscal course for years — if not decades — to come, and will affect virtually all American voters, industries and communities of interest. The stakes couldn’t be higher.

There is only one way to ensure that committee members (the “supers”) stay super-focused on the general good rather than personal gains: through robust transparency. All potentially corrupting outside influences — large campaign contributors, lobbying contacts and fundraising relationships with outside political groups — must be made public.

The reasons for the first two are obvious. Real-time disclosure of large campaign contributions made to supers while they are deliberating is a key way for the American people to ascertain who is trying to curry favor now. Indeed, there is bipartisan support to impose a tight deadline upon such contributions — a rarity in today’s polarized political environment.

In early August, Sen. David Vitter, R-La., introduced the Super Committee Sunshine Act, which would force committee members to disclose contributions over $1,000 within a 48-hour window. In his words, “Given the important work this committee will be doing over the next four months, it’s just plain good government for the public to know what special interests are trying to influence the committee.”

Last week, Reps. Dave Loebsack, D-Iowa, Mike Quigley, D-Ill., and Jim Renacci, R-Ohio, introduced the more comprehensive Deficit Committee Transparency Act. Like its Senate counterpart, this bill would demand prompt disclosure of campaign contributions. It would also require supers and their staffs to publicly disclose meetings with lobbyists and other special interests within 48 hours.

Disclosing lobbying contacts is just plain common sense. As the Washington Post recently reported, almost 100 registered lobbyists who used to work for members of the supercommittee now represent “defense companies, health-care conglomerates, Wall Street banks and others with a vested interest in the outcome of the panel’s work.” And, half of the supers currently employ former lobbyists on their staffs. These close connections already raise the suspicion of backroom dealings. Holding meetings in secret does nothing but confirm our worst suspicions.

Unfortunately, both these bills are currently languishing in committee, and are not likely to see the light of day unless public attention forces congressional leaders to act. Even so, these measures are not enough.

The supers must also be forced to disclose their involvement in soliciting funds for supposedly independent groups that seek to influence politics. These groups — like SuperPACs, 501(c)(4)s, and trade organizations like the Chamber of Commerce — play an outsize role in today’s elections, and can be designed to shield tit-for-tat arrangements with specific candidates. Without transparency, special interests could funnel political dollars for supers through friendly third-party groups with no disclosure obligations, ensuring that their political largess never becomes public.

Supers have certainly benefited from outside spending in recent elections. In her tight reelection last year, Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., enjoyed more than $9 million of outside spending, helping her squeak by her Republican opponent, Dino Rossi. Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., spent years as the president of the anti-tax Club for Growth, a group that spent $8.2 million on independent expenditures last election cycle. As supers anticipate future hard elections, there is no question they will want these heavy-hitting political players on their side.

The temptation to promise political favors today for electoral support tomorrow will be hard to resist. The only solution is full transparency. After all, our democracy is on the front line.

To wit:

1) In “Another Deficit Standoff This Year? Maybe Not,” the Wall Street Journal’s Gerald Seib writes that “there actually are reasons to think [the Super Committee's] effort can work better than the summer’s follies.” Seib cites the closeness to party leaders of the Super Committee’s membership, the drop in popularity ratings that accompanied the debt ceiling debacle, and changes in the Senate’s rules that limit the ability of malcontents to filibuster an agreement produced by the negotiating team.

2) In “Out of Debt Ceiling Fight, Some See a Bit of Stability on Federal Spending,” the New York Times’ Carl Hulse reports that a provision in the Budget Control Act that sets spending limits for both 2012 and 2013 lowers the likelihood of another government shutdown fight this fall when the current continuing resolution empowering the federal government to spend money expires.

3) And perhaps most creatively, ThinkProgress’ Matthew Yglesias finds unexpected reasons for good cheer in the one hard piece of Super Committee-related news so far this week, the naming of a Republican Senate Finance Committee staffer as the staff director for the Super Committee.

The early reaction from liberals to the news that a Republican was named to this important position was unenthusiastic; they see it as proof, once again, that Democrats just don’t play the game of politics very well. But Yglesias comes up with a piece of truly brilliant contrarian analysis.

I think the right way to read this is that if the supercommittee doesn’t deadlock, that will have to be because Republicans agree to do something on the revenue side. And if Republicans agree to anything on the revenue side, that will have to be some kind of loophole-closing “reform” rather than higher rates. Which means that having someone who is knowledgeable about tax law and also credible to Republicans run the show maximizes the odds that the committee will have some kind of result. Prater was, for example, involved in the 1997 budget negotiations that managed to raise revenues while cutting capital gains tax rates. He at least remembers, in principle, what a bipartisan revenue-raising initiative might look like.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is some world-class spin … or completely unwarranted wishful thinking. Take your pick. My own inclination is considerably more pessimistic. Democrats remain opposed to entitlement cuts and Republicans remain opposed to tax increases. Finding a way to cut another trillion or so dollars from the budget over the next 10 years without taking a chunk out of these sacred cows will be, if anything, more difficult than the negotiations at the heart of the last two battles. The easy stuff is already done, and now the cuts are getting progressively closer to the bone.

And the alternative, in the wake of no deal? Across the board cuts that would include reductions in both Medicare and defense spending that will be equally unpalatable to significant blocs of both parties, not to mention healthy care and defense lobbyists. There’s plenty more budget showdown pain to come.

Romney, currently the front-running Republican in the 2012 presidential race, has used the successful ’04 bid to raise the Massachusetts credit rating as a talking point against the president in the wake of S&P’s downgrading of U.S. debt. Romney said, “when I was governor, S&P rewarded Massachusetts with a credit rating upgrade for our sound fiscal management and the underlying strength of our economy.”

However, as Smith notes, Romney’s pitch to S&P in 2004 “bears a far closer resemblance to the right-of-center grand compromise rejected by House Republicans this year — dismissed because it would include new taxes and end tax breaks President Barack Obama described as ‘loopholes’ — or the more modest compromise that passed, than to the Cut, Cap, and Balance plan Romney ‘applauded’.”

The Atlantic Wire’s Rebecca Greenfield points out that “of course this isn’t the first time Romney has veered from his policies as governor — remember Massachusetts health care reform?”