The deficit next year may top $500 billion. There are $25 trillion in unfunded liabilities in Social Security, Medicare and other federal retirement programs. So what do Republicans in Washington offer up as their next big domestic idea? More tax cuts, of course! This time to the tune of $140 billion in corporate tax reductions over the next decade.

The insanity of the GOP tax cut mantra is becoming clear to anyone who can count, as new reports from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities make clear. From 1970 to 2000 federal spending averaged 20.9 percent of GDP. To pay for this spending, which both political parties had voted for over the decades, President Bush inherited a federal government that took in about 20 percent of GDP in revenues. In fiscal year 2003, which just ended, revenues dropped to 16.6 percent of GDP.

This 16.6 percent – mostly the result of Bush’s three rounds of tax cuts – is the lowest federal revenue has been since 1959, near the end of the Eisenhower administration. This was before Medicare and Medicaid existed, not to mention most federal aid for education, student loans, modern levels of Social Security and much more.

In addition, within that revenue total, income taxes, the progressive part of our tax code, sank as a share of GDP to their lowest level since 1941. The payroll tax, which takes its heaviest bite from lower-income workers, rose to its biggest share of federal revenue ever.

The bottom line – and these are facts, not liberal rhetoric – is that Bush’s tax cuts have sent debt soaring and shifted the burden of government to lower-income Americans, all to fund tax cuts mostly for the best-off. These tax cuts have also made a nice start on the “de-funding” of government for which radical conservatives have longed.

From the radical conservatives’ point of view, things are proceeding on plan. Their strategy rests on three premises:

First, most Americans think like children and can therefore be easily persuaded that any Democratic presidential nominee who wants to reverse this fiscal madness can simply be branded as a “tax hiker” and – presto! – discussion will be over, the offending liberal exposed as unfit to lead.

The second (and related) premise is that the national press will cover the tax debate with its usual he-said she-said agnosticism. “Democrats say Bush wants to slash taxes to levels that undermine popular services Americans want. Republicans say tax cuts will boost growth in ways that make these worries needless. You decide.”

But of course citizens can’t decide without the kind of facts laid out above – facts that would have to be repeatedly hammered home by the press until they became common knowledge. Radical conservatives are counting on the press to focus instead (and as usual) on the politics of the tax debate, always easy to do because it requires no policy knowledge whatsoever and avoids conservative charges of “bias.”

“Democrats want to expand health coverage to the 44 million uninsured,” we’ll hear on the tube, “but that will mean repealing the president’s tax cuts, and in the real world that’ll be an uphill climb. Back to you, Dan.”

The third premise is that independent and moderate Republican voters can be deceived into thinking these tax cuts will not have an impact on the levels of government they support because Bush can sell himself as a “compassionate” leader via token hoaxes like the No Child Left Behind education law.

One of the key questions for the 2004 election is whether the tax debate will be as childlike as conservatives hope, or as grown-up as America needs.

How Democrats frame this debate, and how the media is ultimately persuaded to cover it, will go far to determine the contours of the 2004 election – and quite possibly the course of domestic policy for a generation.

Matt Miller, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, is the author of “The Two Percent Solution: Fixing America’s Problems in Ways Liberals and Conservatives Can Love.” Reach him at www.mattmilleronline.com.