President Barack Obama went to last week’s Group of 20 summit in Toronto hoping to convince the world’s economic powers to join the United States’ spending spree to boost the still sluggish global economy. By the time he left, he’d been schooled in the dangers of uncontrollable deficits by his peers on the world stage.

The European leaders in particular wanted no more of the economics Obama was preaching. They’ve seen the damage done by unchecked deficits, and recognize that trying to keep an economy afloat with government spending is not a sustainable strategy.

So instead, they insisted on attacking deficits, agreeing to half their current rate of deficit spending by the year 2013 and stabilize the ratio of debt to Gross Domestic Product by 2016. And Obama signed on to the pledge.

But how he intends to get there will determine the success of the strategy in strengthening the United States for the long haul. Most of the G-20 leaders indicated they would reduce the deficit with lower government spending.

Obama, on the other hand, has committed the United States to $1 trillion annual deficits for at least the next decade. Costs of the health care legislation he pushed through earlier this year will be kicking in during the same period the G-20 has set for reducing deficits.

The White House has formed a bipartisan commission that is charged with coming up with a deficit reduction plan. But its report is not due until after the November elections, an ominous indicator that higher taxes will outweigh real spending cuts.

As a precursor of what to expect, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said that, in the name of deficit control, Congress may not extend the 2001 tax cuts when they expire at the end of the year. That would mean a broad and significant income tax hike on nearly all Americans, and flies in the face of Obama’s oft-repeated promise not to raise taxes on anyone making less than $200,000 a year.

But it will be a lot easier for the president to raise taxes than to cut spending, which is now running about one-third higher than revenues. Cutting spending enough to half the $1.4 trillion deficit and substantially cut into the $13 trillion in accumulated national debt would mean rolling back most of the new programs Democrats have put in place over the past year-and-a-half, including the health care legislation.

Congress shows no sign of being willing to do that.

If the United States chooses taxes over spending cuts while the rest of the world is erasing deficits by making government smaller, it will place America at a competitive disadvantage for investment, rob money that could be used for private sector growth and sharply slow the economy. That’s what higher taxes do.

There’s a reason the other G-20 nations rejected Obama’s call for more spending and opted instead for fiscal discipline. They’ve been where he wanted to take them, and they know it’s a hopeless place.