Tax cuts?  What tax cuts?  The only taxes that got reduced in the lame-duck session’s agreement were Social Security taxes in a one-year “holiday,” and the ability of businesses to write off 100% of their capital investments in 2011, considered to be a boost to infrastructure spending.  The tax rates stayed exactly as they have been for the last seven years, a point which apparently eluded the Washington Post’s headline writer, while Lori Montgomery reported it a little more honestly in the lead.  Later, the Post changed the headline to “tax pledge”:

President Obama’s refusal to raise taxes for the vast majority of Americans will prevent him from pursuing a broad overhaul of the tax code and is making it difficult for him to achieve his goals for reducing the budget deficit, according to administration and congressional sources.

Barely a month after Obama’s fiscal commission laid out a road map for reining in the soaring national debt, the president’s resistance to tax increases for families making less than $250,000 a year has ruled out a key prescription: a plan to reduce cherished but expensive tax breaks for individuals.

Obama is planning to propose deeper cuts in agency spending in the budget request he will submit to Congress next month, including a sharp reduction at the Pentagon. But the president is unlikely to trim nearly as much from future spending as the commission has proposed and nowhere near as much as House Republicans are demanding, the sources said.

Perhaps that’s because no one wants to make the argument that the deficit has been caused by Americans not being taxed enough.  Montgomery writes that “independent budget analysts” are disappointed that Obama didn’t follow through on the recommendations of his deficit panel, which wanted to close a number of tax deductions and loopholes, lower rates, and seriously slash spending.  Even after the election, Obama realized the danger of dumping the blame on taxpayers, since his administration demanded the huge increases in annual spending that have made deficits skyrocket.

The White House wants to overhaul the corporate tax code as a start. However, they’re pledging to do it in a revenue-neutral manner, which means that it will be mostly simplification to reduce compliance costs.  That won’t have any effect on the deficit, at least not in terms of direct revenue, although it might help nudge growth a little farther and realize some revenue enhancement down the road.  Republicans want Obama to address individual tax reform at the same time, which so far the White House has seemed reluctant to do.

The report by Montgomery talks very little about the obvious solution, which is to return to the spending levels of 2007 or even 2008, which would mean eliminating almost all of the deficit.  Only two paragraphs in the entire piece discuss spending reductions at all, even after the midterm elections won the GOP a wave of new seats by running specifically on that platform.  Almost the entirety of the article focuses on tax rates and revenue.  Are spending cuts that far off the table that the Post can’t bother to give them at least as much attention as tax increases in an analysis of Obama’s options on deficit reduction?

Update: I wrote “raise rates” where I meant “lower rates.”  Thanks to the commenters who pointed it out.