President Barack Obama's top budget official promised Tuesday that the administration will try next year to wrestle the skyrocketing budget deficit under control to avoid higher interest rates and putting the health of the economy in jeopardy.

But it is an illustration of just how dire the nation's fiscal picture has become that a promise to cut the deficit in half by 2013 would produce a deficit about $200 billion higher than ever recorded by former President George W. Bush.

In a speech casting most of the blame for deficits averaging almost $1 trillion a year over the next decade - unless action is taken - on tax cuts and a Medicare drug benefit enacted during Bush's tenure, budget director Peter Orszag said the country faces a "serious" and "unsustainable" deficit problem.

Orszag said the administration would propose to cut the deficit inherited by Obama in half by 2013. Under White House budget office calculations, the deficit goal for 2013 is about $650 billion.

The speech was intended to send a signal that after the ongoing health care overhaul debate, the administration is determined to try to take on the deficit - hardly an easy task in a midterm election year.

Proposals in February
Orszag promised that Obama's budget submission next February will propose solutions to shrink the deficit to sustainable levels. At $650 billion, the 2013 deficit would equal almost 4 percent of the size of the economy, a major improvement from this year's $1.4 trillion deficit, which registered at 10 percent of gross domestic product.

"We are currently considering a number of proposals to put our country back on firm fiscal footing, and to cut the deficit we inherited in half by the end of the President's first term," Orszag said in remarks delivered at New York University.

Orszag, however, gave no details on the higher taxes or spending cuts that will be required to curb the deficit. Obama has endorsed most of Bush's tax cuts except for those only benefitting people making more than $250,000 a year.