ON the campaign trail, Barack Obama said he wanted to eliminate the Bush tax cuts for top earners upon taking office in January. Now he seems to favor letting those cuts expire as scheduled, at the end of 2010.

His apparent concern is that raising anyone’s taxes immediately might worsen the economic crisis. As Mr. Obama’s senior adviser, David Axelrod, said when asked on Fox News about the delay, “The main thing right now is to get this economic recovery package on the road, to get money in the pockets of the middle class, to get these projects going, to get America working again, and that’s where we’re going to be focused in January.”

Of course, the government’s first priority must be to stimulate spending as quickly as possible, deficits be damned. But it’s important to get the biggest possible stimulus for any given deficit. To that end, it would make sense for Mr. Obama to stick with his original timetable. Eliminating the Bush tax cuts right away would make it possible to generate a much larger immediate increase in total spending.

Higher tax rates for top earners wouldn’t appreciably reduce their spending. A robust finding in behavioral research is that people are extremely reluctant to accept cutbacks in their standard of living.