Anti-deficit activists Alan Simpson, the former GOP senator from Wyoming, and Erskine Bowles, the former chief of staff to President Bill Clinton, spoke out today against the GOP tax plan that’s now under consideration in the Senate, warning, “Real tax reform can provide a boost to the economy, but higher debt works in the opposite direction.” The Senate tax bill would add $1.4 trillion to the deficit over the next 10 years, according to the latest Congressional Budget Office estimates.

Simpson and Bowles co-chaired the bipartisan National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, on which Idaho Sen. Mike Crapo served; the panel proposed a far-reaching plan in 2010 to cut the deficit through a mix of spending cuts and tax increases, but it failed to win the required supermajority support of 14 of its 18 members. Crapo was among the 11 commission members supporting the plan.

“Unfortunately, the tax plan currently under discussion in Congress ignores nearly all the hard choices we proposed – incorporating only the ‘goodies,’” Simpson and Bowles wrote in a guest opinion that will be published tomorrow in the Washington Post. “It reads as if it were developed for a country whose debt problems have been solved, when in reality debt is the highest it has ever been other than around World War II.”

They warned, “With debt already twice as high as the historical average, financing tax cuts with even more borrowing is reckless. And the actual bills in the House and Senate are even worse than the $1.5 trillion sticker price – because both include about a half-trillion dollars in phony savings from artificial ‘sunsets’ and other gimmicks. With interest, that means these tax cuts could add $2.2 trillion to the debt.”

“If the tax cuts in the current bill are adopted, deficits would exceed $1 trillion by 2020 and debt would exceed 99 percent of GDP by 2027,” Simpson and Bowles wrote. “Economic growth isn’t going to wash away this debt. Real tax reform can provide a boost to the economy, but higher debt works in the opposite direction. … This country cannot afford another debt-busting tax cut.”

You can read their full article here at the Washington Post’s website.