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At that moment, politicians would face a choice: Either allow taxes to rise suddenly and sharply on everyone who pays income taxes, is married, has children, holds stocks and bonds, or expects a large inheritance, or impose mounting budget deficits on the government far into the future, according to projections by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

“It is now a decision-forcing event,” said Robert L. Bixby, executive director of the Concord Coalition, a budget watchdog group. “This is a potential calamity that cannot happen. They are going to have to deal with it and face the consequences.”

In a speech yesterday before the American Council of Engineering Companies, Bush hailed the agreement to extend his 2003 tax cuts on dividends and capital gains, and he implored Congress to make all his tax cuts permanent.

“If the people have their way who want this tax relief to expire, the American people will be hit with $2.4 trillion in higher taxes over the next decade,” Bush said. “A tax increase would be disastrous for business, disastrous for families and disastrous for this economy.”

Taking a partisan turn, the president mocked Democrats who had opposed his tax cuts and had warned that they would lead to economic disaster. “The Democrats’ record of pessimism has been consistent: It’s been consistently wrong,” Bush said to loud applause.

But the decisions taken now inevitably will cause politicians in the future to confront difficult choices — a trade-off that Bush did not acknowledge in his speech.

Rudolph G. Penner, a Republican and former director of the Congressional Budget Office, agreed that tax increases so broad and sudden would be a major shock to the economy. Tax cuts that have accrued over five years of the Bush administration — lowering income tax rates, benefiting married couples, doubling the child tax deduction, cutting tax rates on investment returns and eliminating the estate tax — would disappear overnight.

“I can’t even imagine that happening,” Penner said.

At the same time, Republican and Democratic budget experts said they could not imagine all the tax cuts being extended simultaneously. According to CBO projections, if the Bush tax cuts are extended in 2011, a deficit of $114 billion forecast for the year of their expiration will more than double, to $274 billion. A budget surplus of $67 billion, anticipated for 2016 if all the tax cuts expired, would turn into a $310 billion deficit.

And the red ink would only grow worse from there, as the baby-boom generation swells Medicare and Social Security costs, said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former Bush White House economist who recently retired as CBO director.

In that sense, Holtz-Eakin said, synchronizing the tax-cut expiration dates will have a positive impact, forcing politicians to confront what they so far have refused to acknowledge: the mathematical disconnect between government spending and a tax system that can no longer finance those programs.

“The next president has to have a plan for this, at a minimum,” Holtz-Eakin said. “This is going to have to be elevated to the top end of the political spectrum soon.”

Both Bush and the Republican congressional leadership expressed no alarm yesterday. Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) said sharp reductions in the tax rates on dividends and capital gains have boosted business investment, created jobs and buoyed the economy since their passage in 2003. That outcome, in turn, brought more revenue to the federal government, not less, he said.

Bush said the budget could be balanced by controlling spending while maintaining his tax cuts.

“The best way to reduce our deficit is to keep pro-growth economic policies in place so the economy expands, which will yield more tax revenues, and be wise about how we spend your money,” the president said.

Democrats attacked the agreement to extend the tax cuts for dividends and capital gains as another gift to the rich. Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (Nev.) declared: “Bush’s tax plan offers next to nothing to average Americans while giving away the store to multimillionaires.” House Minority Whip Steny H. Hoyer (Md.) said Bush’s comments on fiscal rectitude “read like a passage from ‘Alice in Wonderland.’ ”

This kind of rhetoric bodes ill for future cooperation on tax and spending questions, Penner said. “Unless there is some reduction in the vicious partisanship that has come to dominate our politics, it’s very hard to imagine people coming together on anything,” he said.