Audacity on steroids. How else to describe the Obama administration's fiscal 2010 budget proposal, unleashed on an American public so staggered by the events of the last few months that they cannot comprehend the magnitude of the plans Mr. Obama and his still-inchoate Cabinet have for the nation.

The list of problems the new president has resolved to put right reads like a roll call of the loftiest policy ambitions of every administration since FDR. Like Harry Truman, Richard Nixon, and Bill Clinton, Obama aims to provide access to healthcare for every American. Like Jimmy Carter, he provides billions to encourage America's home-grown renewable-energy industry. Like Lyndon Johnson, he vows to end childhood hunger within a decade. Like Truman, he proposes free public higher education for virtually all Americans. And like Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, he seeks to stabilize Social Security and Medicare for generations to come.

That each of these projects failed to one degree or another would give pause to most administrations intent on tackling any one of them. By contrast, Obama has declared that, amidst the greatest financial crisis since World War II, he will solve all of them.

Indeed, even his more audacious campaign commitments have grown since he was elected. In a campaign position paper, Obama promised to double funding for cancer research and "launch a new campaign to combat cancer and provide greater lifetime support to cancer survivors and their families." He reiterated his commitment to research funding in his address to Congress last week, and went on to declare that the federal government would cure cancer "in our time."

Candidate Obama laid out a plan that sought to "reduce the high school dropout rate" through investment in innovative early-intervention strategies and redesigning schools. President Obama eschewed such wonkery to warn would-be truants that "dropping out of high school is no longer an option" and asking "every American to commit to at least one year or more of higher education or career training."

When it comes to paying for this commitment, the president again has a plan that far exceeds his campaign trail rhetoric. In 2008, he spoke more prosaically of "putting a college education within reach of every American." To do so, Obama proposed the usual package of tax credits, Pell Grants, and financial aid awareness. Last week, he kicked in the door of affordability by endorsing a proposal to more than triple the size of the AmeriCorps program that funds college for those willing to commit to community service and announcing his intention that, by 2020, America will "once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world."

The breadth of the president's aspirations is commendable. Each of these causes is eminently worthy. Even the title of his budget, "A New Era of Responsibility: Renewing America's Promise," is pitch-perfect for these troubled times.

But for all the talk of shared sacrifice and coming together to solve seemingly intractable problems, he has singled out a tiny sliver of the country to fund his ambitions. In fact - based on the White House's explanations of how Obama will meet the seemingly contradictory goals of paying for these and other programs and halving the budget deficit in four years - if you are not an agricultural juggernaut, earn less than $125,000 per year, and don't emit significant amounts of greenhouse gases, you'll be seeing much more of the promise, and much less of the responsibility.

Of course, no one expects Obama to have figured out in two months how best to fund his many priorities. What's troubling is that, even as his appetite for radical reforms has grown, he's shown no inclination to level with the American people about the costs of making decades' worth of progressive dreams come true - while also cutting spending and rescuing the international financial markets. In the end, that may condemn his audacious plans to failure.