As President Obama and Speaker John Boehner negotiate to resolve the looming fiscal crisis, Americans might be forgiven for believing that the nation’s problems would be solved if they could only agree on whether to raise $1.2 trillion or $1 trillion in new taxes over the next 10 years, or whether they should cut $850 billion rather than $1.2 trillion more in government spending.

This is not, unfortunately, the case. The frenzied partisan horse-trading has glossed over what is arguably the central issue of any debate over long-term fiscal policy: the kind of role we expect the government to play in the nation’s future. Not only have our political leaders failed to lay out a vision of what they hope the budget will achieve, they are pulling the wool over Americans’ eyes about the kind of budget we are about to get.

The truth is that both the president and House Republicans have agreed to shrink a critical part of the government to its smallest in at least half a century. This is regardless of which trillion-dollar proposal gains the upper hand.

Consider the president’s budget, which by law must include projections of taxing and spending over the next decade. Loath to raise taxes on the middle class yet unwilling to cut deeply into the budgets for Social Security or Medicare, the president and his advisers proposed cutting the discretionary part of the budget devoted to everything except defense and other security agencies to 1.7 percent of economic output by 2022, down from 3.1 percent last year.