President Obama defended his proposed $3.73 trillion 2012 budget on Tuesday against criticisms that it would not go far enough in addressing the nation's fiscal crisis in a manner that his own deficit commission suggested.

Facing questions from reporters who pressed him on why his budget cuts did not address entitlement spending, which is the long-term driver of the national deficit, Obama noted that he was on pace to meet his pledge to cut the deficit in half by the end of his first term and said that he would work with members of both parties to address the larger fiscal problems going forward.

"To use an analogy that families are familiar with, we're not going to be running up the credit card anymore," Obama said.

Asked about proposed cuts to expenditures that are particular important to him, such as funding for community programs, Obama said, "There's some provisions in this budget that are hard for me to take."

But most of the questions from reporters were based on concerns that the budget cuts were too meager, rather than too draconian.

In acknowledging these criticisms, Obama also insisted that he was on pace to meet his promises to the nation.

"We've taken a scalpel to the discretionary budget rather than a machete," Obama said. "I've said in the State of the Union, and I'll repeat, that side of the ledger only accounts for 12 percent of our budget."

Obama said that he agreed with "much of the framework" that his fiscal commission put forward, though he disagreed with other parts of it.

The president argued that while Social Security was not the massive contributor to the deficit that it is often portrayed to be, Medicare and Medicaid were indeed "huge problems."

"I'm prepared to work with Democrats and Republicans to start dealing with that in a serious way," Obama said, arguing that the health care reform law had begun to tackle the issue of high medical costs.

Obama said that as Washington turned to address the most pressing fiscal issues, he wanted to see a repeat of the "genuine spirit of compromise" that existed in the lame-duck session of Congress last December when legislators cut a bipartisan deal on taxes and achieved successes on a range of other issues.

"In this town, you guys are pretty impatient," Obama said to the reporters sitting in front of him. "If something doesn't happen today, the assumption is that it's just not going to happen."

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