How Barack Obama’s superbudget is like a superhero.

Today’s budget outline from President Obama isn’t just a story of complex policy trade-offs; it’s an act of glorious imagination—an epic story with the Office of Management and Budget’s Peter Orszag playing the role of nerdy clockmaker. “With great power comes great responsibility,” Spider-Man taught us, and Obama’s budget, emanating from the great power center of the White House, has all the trappings of a film superhero: taking on the scoundrels terrifying the city; enjoying some gravity-defying stunts to overcome obstacles; brooding over a deep, morally complex puzzle; eventually getting pelted by stones from an unappreciative populous; and showing a weakness for a conceptually harmless substance. The superbudget is cleaning house, but Act 2 is still to come.

One villain can make a classic superhero confrontation, but it’s much more satisfying to take on an entire rotten syndicate. The targets of this budget’s Whaps! and Pows! are, in Obama’s words, those “at the commanding heights of our economy”: various categories of high rollers and Earth foulers. The biggest sources of new revenue in this budget come from the sale of carbon-emitting permits under a new cap-and-trade system ($646 billion over 10 years), and a rollback of tax cuts, new restrictions on health care tax deductibility, and higher taxes for hedge-fund managers, all targeting the rich (almost $1 trillion total over 10 years). Our superhero is that classic lower-tech throwback, Robin Hood, dedicating $525 billion in carbon-permit revenues to the “Making Work Pay” tax break for the poor and middling classes, and directing proceeds from upper-class tax increases to deficit reduction (which helps the next generation of men- and womenfolk). By taking on the relatively rich and undoubtedly dirty, Obama is cleaning house in the opening minutes of this flick.

How do our superheroes leap tall buildings in a single bound? Superpowers, of course; this budget has some superassumptions that help the heroes defy gravity (with a little help from special effects). Growth dragging us down? Not to worry—the economy will grow by 3.2 percent in 2010. TARP throwing good money after bad? Not with an expected two-thirds recouping of the $750 billion in new, non-TARP capital injections (should those investments be necessary). Incoming fire from special interests? Nonsense: $10 billion in farm subsidies and $210 billion in preferential corporate tax treatments will be swept away with a brush of the hand.