After spending the first month in office trying to pass a massive spending bill, the White House today launched a new public push on fiscal responsibility, with President Obama promising a new budget plan that will cut the deficit in half by 2012.

"This will not be easy. It will require us to make difficult decisions and face challenges we've long neglected. But I refuse to leave our children with a debt that they cannot repay," Obama said in launching a summit on fiscal responsibility this afternoon.

That starts, he added, by ending the "gimmicks" often employed by other administrations (read: President Bush) to understate the true gap between income and expenditure, what he called an "exercise in deception."

"We do ourselves no favors by hiding the truth about what we spend," he said. "In order to address our fiscal crisis, we're going to have to be candid about its scope. And that's why the budget I will introduce later this week will look ahead 10 years, and will include a full and honest accounting of the money we plan to spend and the deficits we will likely incur."

He said his administration has already begun inspecting its own budget "line by line to root out waste and inefficiency," and urged the rest of Washington to join him in this "new era of responsibility."

"If we want to rebuild our economy and restore discipline and honesty to our budget, we will need to change the way we do business here in Washington," he said. "We're not going to be able to fall back into the same old habits, and make the same inexcusable mistakes."

Today's generic remarks set the table for tomorrow's more detailed address to Congress, press secretary Robert Gibbs said later. He said to expect the president to begin outlining some of the "hard choices" and "specific cuts" he's proposing. Asked about an omnibus spending bill on the docket in Congress right now that includes thousands of earmarks, Gibbs said there "is concern."

"Everybody has to be involved in the sharing of pain in this," he said. "When you're at $1.2 or $1.3 trillion deficit, an economy where we are, I think it's everybody's responsibility to act accordingly."

Gibbs would not promise a veto, however, saying he has not spoken with the president or seen a final draft from Congress.