And what if worse comes to worse, and we go over the fiscal cliff? Taxes would rise on all brackets, not just the top. Disaster? No. We’d actually start funding government again.

So why do we say that we are at a so-called “cliff”? Because preserving the Bush-era tax cuts for the lower 98 percent of families was the Faustian bargain that Obama made with populism in order to be elected in 2008 and re-elected in 2012. He would not have won the election in 2008 without promising to keep taxes low for the middle class. He would not have won re-election this month without making the same promise. He and his political advisers were right.

I have no quarrel with that political diagnosis. I have no quarrel with the president trying to maintain the Bush tax cuts for the bottom 98 percent. He has campaigned on that, continuously, for the past five years. I understand why he did it.

And compared with his opponents, Obama wins hands down on substance. Ending tax breaks at the top is vastly better than the Republican position of slashing tax rates for everybody, a sheer fiscal delusion.

All the same, this is no cliff. The budget deficit is $1.1 trillion, 7 percent of national income. It has topped $1 trillion for the past four years, and should not have done so. We are hemorrhaging debt. We need to pay for government, and repealing the Bush-era tax cuts would help to close the gap. The repeal at the top, as Obama recommends, would raise around $100 billion per year, or 0.7 percent of GDP. The repeal for all (“going over the cliff”) would raise around $400 billion per year, or 2.5 percent of GDP. It wouldn’t close the deficit by itself, but it would help. (We would still need other taxes: ending the Cayman Island corporate loopholes, limiting some deductions of high-end households, taxing carbon dioxide emissions, taxing mega-wealth, and taxing financial transactions.)

Trust in politics is important, so Obama should stick with his plan: raise the rates at the top, extend the cuts for the rest. Yes, he’ll have to come up with other kinds of revenues if he does that. But what if John Boehner and Company — a leadership group further removed from reality than any other in modern times — hold firm and reject this policy? Then Obama should let all of the rates expire, as is of course within his power.

Obama should then immediately re-submit legislation calling for cuts for the bottom 98 percent again to stick with his plan. This would preserve the president’s good faith with the American people. The Senate would quickly pass the plan. The Republicans in the House could then block it, out of sheer spite, or sign on. They’d most probably cave, just as Newt Gingrich did in 1995. But if not, the country would be better off, not worse off. Obama would finally have some revenues to pay for basic government services without spilling more than a trillion in new debts each year.

But what about the recession, the double-dips, and all of that, that would ensue in this concocted nightmare? If you are a Keynesian, which I am not, you will pay rapt attention to the quarterly changes of household spending that you believe will come with the quarterly changes in tax collections. The right answer then would be to offset the rise in taxes with a higher trajectory of spending in the short term, on a temporary basis.

Rather than sequestering funds, we could avoid the sequestration, and pay for more even on top of that. We might be able to start building a more resilient coastline, a more drought-resistant Midwest, and a lower-carbon energy system. For the pure Keynesians among us, a dollar-for-dollar offset of the higher taxes with higher temporary spending would be a net stimulus, not a net contraction. It’s called the budget-balance multiplier. In the long-term the higher revenues are called good government: paying for what we need.

The truth is the fiscal cliff is a melodrama of populism versus greed. It is no death dance, no real cliff. It is Washington unable to take seriously the budget process of a government that spends more than $3.5 trillion per year yet doesn’t know the revenue side six weeks ahead. It is a shameful demonstration of the failure of our national politics and policy processes, not a true drama over economic policy or the meaning of government.

There is a better way than all of this the next time around. It would be to treat the electorate as grown-ups, and for Americans to look together at the real budget numbers and needs. In all of my budget experience with around two-dozen high-income countries throughout the world, America’s budget process is the most opaque of any that I know. Getting even a spreadsheet of multi-year budget plans out of the White House or Congress is about the most difficult act of all.

Both sides bandy numbers around that are impossible to understand. The Republicans demand lower tax rates offset by secret loophole closing. The electorate rightly guffawed, sending Romney into political retirement. On the other hand, the president wants $1.6 trillion of “new revenues” over a decade – sounding like a serious number indeed – without explaining that $1.6 trillion over a decade is $160 billion per year, which is just one percent of national income when the deficit is 7 percent of national income, and without explaining the baseline numbers.

How about just one budget spreadsheet, laid out carefully for a decade, to see what we want to spend money on and how much it will cost? If we ever get around to that basic calculation honestly and transparently, we would know that we do not face a fiscal cliff. We face the need for more budget revenues than we’ve so far programmed, because America is too great a country to balance the budget on the backs of the elderly, the poor, the creaky infrastructure, the needed science and technology, and the education of our children. We will, in the end, pay the price of civilization.

Professor Jeffrey Sachs is Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University and author of “The Price of Civilization.”