With the House set to vote on tax legislation this week, and with the Senate Finance Committee looking at various tax bills as well, it's time to take stock of the wild claims being made by Administration and Congressional Republicans about the fiscal and economic impact of their proposals. To put in another way, Americans need the equivalent of one of those "truth-in-lending" disclosure forms that tell them the real cost of their home loan or credit card balances. In effect, the president and his supporters are asking the country to take out truly stupendous loans for tax cuts that even supporters have a hard time connecting to any theory of economic growth.

Unfortunately, the GOP seems determined to be as deceitful as possible about these tax cuts. Congressional Republicans are using the hoariest gimmick of all to dishonestly underestimate the costs of their proposals: the phony sunset. The House Ways and Means Committee bill, for example, increases the child tax credit from $600 to $1,000 for three years and then cuts it back to $700 in the fourth. It also accelerates so-called "marriage penalty relief" but then sunsets that, too, in four years. Since these are probably the two most popular items in the President's proposal, everybody knows that letting them expire is about as likely as the House cafeteria hiring a French pastry chef. But the deception reduces the official cost of the tax cut and helps the House stay under the $550 billion limit it imposed in its budget resolution.

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Charles Grassley (R-IA), who's working under a $350 billion limit on the cost of tax cuts, is looking at a different phony sunset: phasing out taxes on corporate dividends over three years, and then reimposing them at current rates in the fourth year.

But an even bigger dose of hokum is being administered in Republican assurances that the President's proposals will magically produce a million jobs right away. There's no reason to assume they'll create any jobs at all. Certainly the first round of Bush tax cuts had no positive effect (the economy has actually lost two million jobs since the president took office, despite tax cuts representing three percent of the gross domestic product). Going forward, the handpicked Republican director of the Congressional Budget Office concluded the president's budget proposals as a whole would likely have little or no impact on the economy -- and if there were an impact, it might be negative. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan opposes further tax cuts unless they are paid for.

Who, other than Republicans in Washington, is sold on another round of tax cuts targeted to the wealthy as an economic panacea? Certainly not Republican state and local elected officials facing budget shortfalls. The Administration is turning a deaf ear to their calls for help, and worse yet, the president's tax package would cost states an estimated $8 billion per year in direct revenue losses. (Many states use federal rules for defining taxable income, which would be narrowed by the corporate dividend proposal.) Meanwhile, the package would add as much as $155 billion over 10 years in higher borrowing costs for state and local governments whose bonds would suffer from higher interest rates.

It's not even clear many business leaders care a lot about the largesse the president is trying to shower on them and other high-end taxpayers. A couple of months ago, conservative super-lobbyist Grover Norquist was publicly complaining about the arm-twisting he was having to do to get the business community to support the president's proposals.

The one certain thing about the Bush tax cuts of the past is that they have helped push the country from budget surpluses to deficits, and from debt reduction to new borrowing.

Still more borrowing is the one certain aspect of the new proposals.

Given the threadbare nature of the economic arguments for these tax cuts, you have to wonder about persistent reports that the real rationale is simply political: By pushing for tax cuts, the president will be able to claim he's doing something to revive the economy going into his 2004 re-election campaign. If he gets his tax cuts, he can reward wealthy Republican constituencies and take credit if the economy gets better. If he's thwarted by Congressional Democrats, he can then blame them for any economic problems that might ensue.

We hope the president isn't asking to run up more than three-quarters-of-a-trillion dollars in public debt simply to anticipate negative campaign ads. But the American people, on whose behalf he is asking for these loans, certainly have the right to ask.