The Senate begins debate today on the horribly misnamed "growth package" cobbled together by Finance Committee Chairman Charles Grassley (R-IA) as part of the Administration's effort to enact a three-quarters-of-a-trillion dollar tax cut. The debate will be full of twists and turns and amendments, and the final result may not be known until a House-Senate conference committee deliberates weeks from now. But the bottom line should not be obscured: this debate is about the president's efforts to spend money we don't have on people who don't need it, in a way that is likely to hurt, not help, our economy.

Hardly anybody really believes the kind of tax cuts the Administration is pushing will do anything significant to revive the economy, despite the President's bizarre claims that it will create a million new jobs by the end of the year (since the first big tax cut in 2001, the economy has lost about 2 million jobs). The latest reality check came from Congress' Joint Committee on Taxation (controlled by Republicans), which concluded the Administration's proposed tax cuts would at best have a slight positive impact on the economy in the short run, but could also have a negative impact on the economy within just a few years thanks to the public borrowing required to pay for it.

It's increasingly clear that the GOP's tax cut drive is one of those three-cushion shots that White House political chief Karl Rove is so famous for. It allows the President and his party to look like they are trying to do something about the economy, while actually pursing two long-range Republican goals:

• Paralyzing and then shrinking the federal government by deliberately engineering large federal budget deficits (the so-called "starve the beast" theory); and
• Shifting the nation's tax burden from the wealthy to the middle class.

Both these dishonorable goals are being pursued in a dishonorable manner.

The "starve the beast" approach to limiting the size of government is inherently deceptive and cowardly. Republicans who don't have the courage to propose cuts in popular federal programs -- or the intelligence to figure out how to reform programs to get more for less -- instead use the strategy of going on a national borrowing binge that will eventually force draconian cuts by future Congresses and future Administrations.

And the GOP's assault on the principle of progressive taxation is being disguised as a tax cut rather than as a tax shift -- the shifting will occur down the road when taxpayers have to pay off the debts being run up to finance those tax cuts targeted to the wealthiest Americans.

It's up to Democrats to expose these deceptions, and to stop the implementation of these two profoundly destructive and irresponsible strategies.

As the Senate debate unfolds, centrists from both parties will and should try to limit the damage by eliminating gimmicks (like phony "sunsetting" of tax cuts a few years down the road to disguise their real cost) and shaping the package to get some good to accompany the bad in the mix. For example, it makes sense to ensure that any effort to accelerate tax cuts enacted in 2001 includes the expanded child tax credit, reductions in the bottom bracket tax rate, and marriage penalty relief, along with emergency measures like an extension of unemployment benefits and aid to cash-strapped states. But in the end, such improvements will be like those made to the first Bush tax cuts -- not enough to justify supporting the final package. As we said in 2001, improvements will be like "putting earrings on a warthog. Sure it looks better, but it's still a warthog."

The Senate should hang tough, stop the madness, and just say no to this latest stage of the GOP's long march into economic incoherence, reverse class warfare, and fiscal irresponsibility.