C. “[W]hen done right, [tax cuts] actually result in more money for government.”

D. “There is no such thing as a free lunch.”

The answer, of course, is statement D. Statement D also is the only one of these statements that’s backed by hard evidence. Statements A through C — made recently by President Bush, Vice President Cheney and Senate Majority Leader Frist, respectively — are not.

Statements A through C argue that tax cuts pay for themselves. They claim, in other words, that the economy grows so quickly as a result of tax cuts that it produces as much revenue as it would have produced without the tax cuts.

That’s not what the data show.

During the nine previous economic recoveries since World War II, revenues grew an average of 2.7 percent per year, after adjusting for inflation and population growth. But during the current economic recovery, which included large tax cuts enacted in 2001 and 2003, revenues have actually fallen an average of 0.6 percent per year in real per-person terms. Revenue growth has improved recently, but this hasn’t made up for the deep drop in revenues starting in 2001.

The historical record doesn’t suggest that the tax cuts will pay for themselves over the longer term, either. Congress cut taxes in the early 1980s and raised taxes in the early 1990s. But the economy grew at very similar rates in both decades, and revenues grew much more quickly in the 1990s (when taxes were raised) than in the 1980s (when taxes were cut). (We measure growth from one business-cycle peak to the next, which avoids distortions that can come from looking at shorter time periods.)

The administration itself projects that over the current decade, revenues will grow much more slowly than they did in either the 1990s or the 1980s.

Why does all of this matter? The federal government is currently running a deficit of several hundred billion dollars each year, in part because of the large tax cuts enacted since 2001. Experts from across the political spectrum agree that deficits could skyrocket in thecoming decades as the baby boomers retire and health care costs continue to mount.

These facts strongly suggest that now is not the time to weaken federal revenues further through more tax cuts. Yet more tax cuts are exactly what the Bush administration and the congressional leadership want. President Bush recently signed legislation extending the tax cuts related to capital gains and dividends, and the Senate will soon consider whether to eliminate much or all of the estate tax. To help push these and additional tax cuts through Congress, the president and his congressional allies have been suggesting that tax cuts are basically free.

Yet tax cuts aren’t free, as the data show and as every serious economist acknowledges. When Douglas Holtz-Eakin, formerly the chief economist for President Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers and then head of the Congressional Budget Office, was asked recently if tax cuts can pay for themselves, he responded simply, “No.”

If we enact more tax cuts without paying for them, we will expand the federal deficit, increase pressure for cuts in vital government services and saddle our children with an even larger burden of debt. It’s time for Congress and the president to accept this basic fact.

Richard Kogan is a senior fellow and Aviva Aron-Dine is a research assistant at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in Washington, D.C.