House Republicans are planning to hold a vote tomorrow on the radical “cut, cap, and balance” plan, which stipulates that the federal debt ceiling only be raised if a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution is sent to the states for ratification. As we’ve noted time and again, such an amendment is a phony solution to the nation’s budget challenges, and would force the government into actively making economic downturns worse.

But the current version of the amendment that the GOP is pushing is even worse than all that. In addition to preventing the government from taking steps to ameliorate an economic downturn, the plan would also cap federal spending at 18 percent of GDP. To get a sense for how radical this is, the House Republican budget authored by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) — which eviscerated Medicare and Medicaid — still has spending above that level in 2040.

As the Center for American Progress’ Michael Ettlinger and Michael Linden noted today, actually getting spending down to that level would require 25 percent cuts in every government program, including the Pentagon and Social Security (or, of course, deeper cuts for every program that gets left untouched):

In 2016, for example, we estimate that total federal spending is likely to be around $4.4 trillion, or 22.9 percent of GDP. [...] Of that $4.4 trillion in 2016, about $520 billion will be interest payments on the debt — an area Congress can’t directly cut. That leaves about $3.9 trillion in noninterest spending, from which Congress would have to slash about $1 trillion in order to bring total spending down to 18 percent of GDP. This would require a 25 percent cut to everything in the federal budget — from Social Security to veterans’ benefits to the Pentagon to education. Congress could try to protect some programs from such severe reductions but then, of course, other areas would have to be slashed even more.

Cutting spending so deeply would reduce the federal budget to the level at which it was in 1966, when the country’s needs and demographics were very different. No President in the last 50 years, including conservative icon Ronald Reagan, has even proposed a budget with spending so low. But the GOP is willing to have the country default on its obligations unless Congress adopts this radical path.

Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ)

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) made headlines a year ago with his claim that “there’s no evidence whatsoever that the Bush tax cuts actually diminished revenue. They increased revenue, because of the vibrancy of these tax cuts in the economy.” And in recent weeks, numerous lawmakers and presidential candidates have relied on the false tax-cuts-produce-revenues talking point to justify the GOP’s economic platform.

Presidential candidate and former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty extended the argument to all tax cuts, telling Fox News that “whether it be the Bush tax cuts, the Reagan tax cuts, or other tax cuts, they always produce an increase in revenue. There’s no dispute about that.” Rep. Joe Walsh (R-IL), presidential candidate Herman Cain, and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney have all made similar remarks.

But Rep. Trent Frank (R-AZ) took the argument a step further by pinpointing an exact figure in the supposed revenue increase enacted by the Bush tax cuts in a July 15 interview with ThinkProgress.

We know that if we grow this economy, that nothing will do more good toward bringing in additional revenues to government. And that’s not to theory; that’s a historical observation. Even the much-maligned Bush tax cuts brought in an additional $100 billion a year to government coffers. We forget that unless someone is out there producing, there’s no tax revenue. There’s no revenue. There’s no nothing for anyone.

Watch it:

The data compiled by the White House’s Office for Budget and Management could not prove Frank to be more wrong. In fact, federal revenues from individual income taxes saw a $136 billion decrease between 2001 and 2002, the year the first round of the Bush tax cuts went into effect.

Although Frank could have been referring to a $97.8 billion increase in federal income tax revenues between 2003 and 2004, such a jump is largely dependent on an unexpected $57.6 billion rise in the corporate income tax revenues. Both rounds of the Bush tax cuts did not apply to the corporate income tax rates and thus had no role in 2004′s larger revenue intake.

Toward the end of the decade, the amount in nominal dollars did begin to increase again, reaching $1.16 trillion at its 10-year apex in 2007. But economists point to revenues as a percentage of national GDP as the true measure of how much federal receipts fluctuate over the years. And according to those figures, the individual income tax revenues never recovered from the blows Bush’s tax policy inflicted in 2001 and 2003, respectively.

During Clinton’s last year in office, the personal tax revenue collected measured up to 10.2 percent of GDP; in 2004, it only came in at 6.9 percent of GDP, the lowest figure seen since 1951 and almost a full percentage point below the lowest figure reported during Reagan’s presidency. Even before the housing bubble burst in 2008, the federal government was not seeing personal income tax revenues close to their pre-Bush tax-cuts levels when measured as a percentage of GDP.

Furthermore, a recent study released by the Economic Policy Institute on the Bush tax cuts’ economic ramifications finds that “the decade of the Bush tax cuts had, on average, lower revenue levels as a share of the economy than any previous decade since the 1950s” and that the two rounds of tax cuts increased the national debt by $2.6 trillion over the course of nine years. Alan Viard, a senior economist from the Bush administration, even admitted in 2006 that there is “really no dispute among economists” that the tax cuts drained federal revenue.

Ironically, in the moments before his defense of the Bush tax rates as good fiscal decision, Frank criticized President Obama as being out of touch “with all mathematical reality” when it comes to stymieing the growth of the national debt.

–Sarah Bufkin