Congressional leaders need to cut the amount of spending in the current stimulus bills they passed as the start to confer this week – or risk pushing the country deeper into recession and possibly into a depression, numerous economists and scholars told The Post.

The current bill being debated by the Senate contains about $820 billion in public-works programs, corporate bailouts and one-time rebates to individuals, which will no more work under this president than they did under his predecessor, the economists argue.

“There’s no such thing as the tooth fairy,” said Stephen Moore, one of the authors of the book “The End of Prosperity.” Moore’s co-author, economist Arthur Laffer, says President John Kennedy’s tax cut in the early 1960s succeeded in part because it didn’t attempt to redistribute income by raising taxes on the rich in the middle of a recession.

“Right now, there’s just not enough tax cuts and there’s just too much spending on non-essential items,” said Peter Wallison, a scholar with the American Enterprise Group in Washington and a former general counsel to the US Treasury Department.

Some laissez-faire economists point to the depression of 1920-21 and how the federal government at the time dealt with it as a guide for escaping the current recession. Just after World War I the nation was stuck in a depression, with unemployment doubling from 5.5 percent to 11 percent.

But, because the government had less authority and will to act, no stimulus measures could be quickly put in place. Yet the economy naturally recovered within a year after millions lost their jobs in 1920, according to Professor Peter Boettke, who teaches economics at George Mason University.

“My studies of depressions show that those economies that bit the bullet and allowed liquidations were the fastest to turn around,” says Boettke.