(FORTUNE Magazine) – In Facing Up (Simon & Schuster, $22), investment banker Peter G. Peterson takes on two giant challenges. The first is devising a credible plan to shrink America's large and persistent federal budget deficit. The second -- and let's face it, the hardest -- is getting readers who have overdosed on 12 years of deficit-denunciations to give a damn. Peterson succeeds, in part, by personalizing the beast. As a successful businessman and son of a thrifty Greek immigrant, he is persuasive raising the familiar complaint that deficits siphon money out of the national savings pool where it could be tapped for investment in people and machines. As a father of five and grandfather of three, he has standing to lament a debt burden that in ten years could leave today's youngsters paying an annual interest bill of $300 billion. ''Our deficits are a kind of fiscal child abuse,'' he writes in a book peppered with pithy lines. To end that abuse, Peterson calls for balancing the budget by the year 2000. His solutions are tough but credible: deep cuts in Social Security and Medicare benefits, smaller tax deductions for employer-paid health insurance, a tight cap on federal health care spending (which would lead, he stresses, to some rationing of care), and higher taxes -- specifically, a new consumption tax and a 50-cents-a-gallon gas tax. Doesn't this balance the budget on the backs of middle-class Americans? That's the point, says Peterson, who also endorses President Clinton's income-tax hike on the rich; the middle is where the money is -- and where most entitlement spending goes. He's right, though I'd argue his plan depends too much on taking away pension promises already made to future retirees. A better approach would be to rely more on the consumption tax, a levy that would spare savings and fall only on income spent. Who cares, many politicians will respond. Either way, hitting middle-class voters this hard is political suicide -- and thus won't happen. But Peterson knows he's pushing strong medicine. Indeed, the American Association of Retired Persons is so powerful, he notes, that its Washington mailroom has its & own zip code! Still, he continues to hope that Americans, once fully aware of the magnitude of the nation's fiscal crisis, will come together and sacrifice for the future. Maybe. They certainly could find no better reality check than this book.