Previews of Barack Obama's budget, due for formal announcement later today, show that the new regime has clearly taken a radically different course than the Bush-Cheney regime — and the Clinton administration — did.

Instead of huge tax cuts for the rich at the expense of the middle-class and poor — a hallmark of the Bush budgets — this budget would raise taxes on the rich and could sharply increase health coverage for workers and retirees.

It could, but it probably won't. Budgets always get worked over, and this one will be so red-penciled by opponents that you won't be able to read it.

The New York Times notes that such a plan will introduce "a politically volatile edge to the Congressional debate over his domestic priorities."

(Click on the video to see BBC's January 23 take on U.S. health care and other issues.)

Returning to Obama's budget: Already draining our resources is the Iraq quagmire, which costs $170 billion a year. Then there's the Afghan War, which will only get more costly. And our latest war is with the recession sparked by wealthy Wall Streeters. The new budget would be a sort of punishment of them, though it's not intended that way.

Aside from such coincidental revenge, the proposed budget is so ambitious and would require such a sharp turnaround from policies of the past 25 years — and wheedling by lobbyists for the powerful industry of HMOs, insurers, and other middlement — that there's little chance of such major restructuring actually happening.

Even without that opposition, such a change would be extremely difficult and could take years to take effect in a big way.

It's hard enough to steer an 18-wheeler truck around a regular corner at a regular intersection. This will be like sending such a truck up Mount Everest on an endless series of hairpin switchbacks. (Those of you in Colorado and the Intermountain West will get my drift.)

Bill Clinton wussed out and didn't spend his own political capital on such health-care reform with his first budget. Instead, he turned it over to a task force led by his wife, who had far less political clout. If Bill Clinton wasn't going to immediately address health care — which was already a crisis when he took over in 1993 — he could have turned it over not to Hillary but to an experienced pol like hard-working Ted Kennedy, who was immersed in such issues and could hammer away at his fellow senators. But the Clintons were too conservative and immediately rejected national health care in favor of a system that created middlemen to soak up money and did very little to help the middle-class.

Back to the present: "Taxes, Spending Cuts To Fund Health Plan," headlines the Wall Street Journal, adding:

Numbers that will get more attention — and more consternation among the rich and conservatives:

• $1.75 trillion, the projected federal budget deficit this year.

• $318 billion, the hike in taxes on upper-income Americans.