Attempting to justify the Congressional GOP's push to extend and make permanent President Bush's first term tax cuts, many Republican legislators and pundits, including the vice president, have recently claimed tax cuts pay for themselves by spurring economic growth. While this argument bolsters their call for tax cut permanence, the evidence shows the claim is more fiction than hard fact. The first evidence pointing to the dubiousness of these claims is the tax cuts have yet to actually pay for themselves. The government has run massive, sustained deficits each year since the tax cuts were enacted and according to the president's own budget numbers, will continue to bring in insufficient revenue to close that gap. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) has recently calculated that federal revenues in the three years following the president's tax cuts (2003 - 2005) have been $316 billion below what the administration had forecast before the cuts were adopted (Claim That Tax Cuts "Pay For Themselves" Is Too Good To Be True, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Mar. 8, 2006). In fact, the administration itself does not believe the tax cuts will recover enough revenues through stimulated economic growth, as its own budget forecasts have continuously shown revenue growth to be smaller than historical averages, causing sustained deficits in the decades to come. While there have been other forces involved in recent deficits, such as the recession during the president's first term and increase military and defense spending since Sept. 11, a study by the CBPP has shown the primary factor contributing to current deficits has been the tax cuts enacted in 2001 and 2003 (Tax Cuts Have Played Much Larger Role Than Spending Increases In Current Deficit). Challenges to the administration's claims about its economic policies are nothing new. For years, prominent economists and analysts, some of whom have worked for the president, have called into question evidence to support the claim that tax cuts replace anywhere near the full amount of lost revenue. Ironically, the first group to cast doubt on such claims was the president's own Council of Economic Advisors (CEA). In 2003, during the debate over yet another round of huge tax cuts, Glenn Hubbard, then chairman of the CEA, maintained that less than half of the tax cuts would be replaced by increased economic growth, even in the best case scenario. Hubbard's successor as chairman of the CEA had still harsher criticisms of the tax cuts. Greg Mankiw, who served as the chairman of the CEA from 2003 until 2005, wrote that there is "no credible evidence" that tax cuts pay for themselves and, in an often quoted line, an economist who makes such a claim is a "snake oil salesman who is trying to sell a miracle cure" (Principles of Economics, Gregory N. Mankiw, 2003). This sentiment was repeated in the CEA's Economic Report of the President in 2003 that stated, "Although the economy grows in response to tax reductions (because of higher consumption in the short run and improved incentives in the long run), it is unlikely to grow so much that lost tax revenue is completely recovered by a higher level of economic activity" (2003 Economic Report of the President, pg. 58). Many analysts have drawn similar, if not quite so rosy, conclusions. A recent report by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) explored the economic and budgetary impact of a theoretical 10 percent cut in income tax rates under a wide variety of scenarios. The CBO concluded the budgetary impact could be estimated to offset between 1 and 22 percent of the lost revenue from the tax cuts in the first five years and could in fact decrease those offsets by 5 percent in the second five years. Even under the most optimistic of circumstances, CBO found any offset of the tax cuts to be almost 25 percent less than Dr. Hubbard's 40 percent estimate (Analyzing the Economic and Budgetary Impacts of a 10 Percent Cut in Income Tax Rates, Dec., 2005). Studies by the Federal Reserve Board, the Congressional Research Service, and independent analysts of all political stripes have corroborated the conclusion that tax cuts do not fully pay for their cost to the U.S. Treasury. Both the former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan and the current chairman Ben Bernanke have testified to Congress on multiple occasions that tax cuts do not pay for themselves, especially when they are deficit-financed, as almost all of the president's tax cuts have been. Former Chairman Greenspan told Congress in 2004, "Very few economists believe that you can cut taxes and you will get the same amount of revenues. When you cut taxes, you gain some revenue back. We don't know exactly what this is, but it's not small, but it's also not 70 percent or anything like that." If fact, when tax cuts are deficit-financed, they increase both the deficit and the national debt and could actually have a negative economic impact, lowering the national savings rate, increasing long-term interest rates, and dampening economic activity. Worried economists and analysts watched as the national savings rate plummeted from 1.8 percent throughout 2004 (already a historical low) to negative 0.5 percent in the third quarter of last year. Consumers have been propping up the economy by continuing to spend--helped in large part by quickly rising housing prices--yet if consumer behavior shifts and Americans begin saving more, the economy might move toward another recession. Changes in tax policy of the magnitude of the Bush tax cuts have more impact than simply giving Americans their money back, most particularly with respect to the government's fiscal health. Any claims by the administration or outside sources that tax cuts are able to completely pay for themselves should be immediately rejected. All the evidence shows that any economic benefits of the cuts will not offset the cost to the government, particularly when the cuts add to the national debt and place an increasing burden on the economy. While such claims may serve ideological ends of the president and his supporters', they are political rhetoric far removed from the facts.