Will it turn into a disaster?

Rather than providing a lift to the stumbling US economy, the tax plan hatched earlier this week in Washington is causing problems.

So soon?

Yes, so soon!

And put this problem together with the bungled effort by the Federal Reserve to stoke growth through another quantitative easing (QE2) — which sane men understand is the printing of billions of dollars in additional money so Washington can act as a shill in its own bond auctions — and the situation is getting pretty frightening.

As you’ve already read elsewhere, the Republicans and Democrats earlier this week decided to extend tax cuts first put in place during the Bush administration.

The Bush tax cuts are already baked into the federal budget deficit. So extending them won’t have any additional effect on government borrowing.

(My view: It would have been insane to reinstate taxes on anyone when the economy is this weak. Although we’d like to cut budget deficits, that’ll just have to wait.)

But also included in the package announced on Monday — which hasn’t been enacted yet — are $200 billion in additional tax benefits. The main part of this is a payroll tax cut aimed at putting more money in people’s pockets. Heck, everyone wants more money in their pockets. So, what could be wrong with that?

First off, there’s no guarantee people will spend this extra money. They didn’t the last time when the Bush administration sent everyone a few hundred bucks in a failed effort to help the economy.

If people just bank the extra dough they find in each of their paychecks it does the economy little good in the near term.

(Perhaps Washington should just send everyone debit cards to major department stores. Then, at least, we’ll know the money will actually make it into the economy.)

Wall Street lined up and applauded this week’s tax move. Some economists from the very firms bailed out by Washington two years ago raised their forecast for economic growth next year.

They probably didn’t notice what has been happening in the bond market, where interest rates that have been climbing steadily ever since before Fed chief Ben Bernanke announced the second phase of his QE plan. Rates shot up even more this past week on the tax plan.

That $200 billion in added tax benefits will raise the federal deficit and cause Washington to need even more money, which’ll drive borrowing costs for everyone higher.

Higher interest rates mean more costs for companies and consumers, which is a depressant for the economy.

So the moves by the White House, Congress and the Fed over the past two months are not only not helping, they are hurting.

You don’t have to look any further than the housing market to see what’s happening.

According to the Mortgage Bankers Association, a homebuyer would now have to pay 4.66 percent on a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage.

Back before Bernanke attempted to keep rates low with QE2, that rate was only 4.25 percent.

In the last week alone that mortgage rate has risen from 4.56 percent to 4.66 percent. And the rate will move up even more next week.

There’s a lag between mortgages and the rest of the bond market, so that’s a guarantee and not a prediction.

Mortgages are now nearly 10 percent more expensive. So, you’re probably thinking it is a good thing that sales of existing homes rose 10 percent in the most recent report.

Well, there’s a problem with that number as well. That 10-percent gain, reported by the National Association of Realtors, represents contracts that were signed to buy a home. These are not final sales.

That extra 10 percent in their mortgage bill might cause a lot of those would-be homebuyers to walk away from their deals or not qualify for loans.

Take a look at Washington’s actions in another way — from a wallet-eye view of consumers.

That extra $200 billion won’t be finding its way to consumers until some time in the future — at best.

But Washington is already costing people money, through the higher interest rates I just mentioned and soaring commodities prices, which reflect people’s (and in this case I mean Wall Street speculators’) views of what will happen to inflation in the future.

Gasoline prices, for instance, are nearing an average of $3 a gallon in this country, despite the fact that Americans are using far less fuel because of the recession.

That’s more than 22 cents a gallon higher than during the so-called peak driving season this past summer, according to the Energy Information Agency.

And it’s 35 cents a gallon more than people were paying last year at this time.

Each 10 cents a gallon in crease takes about $14 bil lion out of consumers’ pockets. So that 35-cent increase is costing con sumers about $50 billion a year, or about one-quar ter of the tax cut that might be enacted.

This is a case of the pain preceding the gain — a gain that might never come.

(I’ll have more on the zany, wild world of gasoline prices soon.) jcrudele@nypost.com