President Obama has made it all but official — better forget his 2008 presidential campaign promise to avoid raising taxes on households making less than $250,000 and individuals making less than $200,000. In an interview with Bloomberg News concerning his proposal for a bipartisan presidential commission on the federal budget, the chief executive said: “The whole point of it is to make sure that all ideas are on the table. So what I want to do is to be completely agnostic, in terms of solutions.” To further clarify that he was talking about across-the-productive-board tax increases, Obama added this observation: “The real problem has to do with the fact that there is just a mismatch between the amount of money coming in and the amount of money going out. And that is going to require some big, tough choices that, so far, the political system has been unable to deal with.”

What all that adds up to, according to Obama, is a “structural deficit.” But career politicians like Obama always talk about “structural deficits” when what they really mean to say is they refuse to go beyond token cuts in federal spending, so taxes have to go up to pay for their profligacy. They’re like an alcoholic who blames recurring headaches on drugstores stocking too few aspirins.