President Bush's "economic growth and job creation program" now dances before Congress like an Orwellian mirage. The administration is trying to justify its outsized tax cut plan by resorting to the Reagan era's discredited pipe dream of supply-side economics. Like an alchemist, Mr. Bush contends his pending $726 billion "growth" proposal will considerably compensate for lost tax revenues by spurring economic development, somewhere over the rainbow.

Republicans in Congress love talking about their "growth package," and it certainly does sound better than a tax-breaks-for-the-wealthy package. But if they cared to listen, an excellent and objective analysis of its real effects can be found right in the Capitol. Far from the economic growth and deficit reductions predicted by the White House, the tax cuts would mean more than $1 trillion in deficits in the next five years alone, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The C.B.O. is the lawmakers' nonpartisan in-house source for estimating the actual bottom-line numbers of blue-sky proposals.

The conclusion is particularly relevant because the estimates were done by the "dynamic scoring" method long demanded by supply-side conservatives who find traditional static techniques less liberal, to use a word, in assuming that bounty follows tax cuts. The conclusion is interesting, too, because the new C.B.O. director, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, is a respected economist who until recently was a White House adviser favored for his supply-side leanings. In a particularly graceful, unpugnacious turn of phrase, the budget office concluded after weeks of testing various models that the larger economic claims for the president's proposals were "not obvious."