Editorial:

Trump tax reform proposal is more bluster than substance.

Politically polarized, practically vague and fraught with peril for ordinary Americans — if you liked the unnerving campaign to deconstruct health care just waged by President Trump and congressional Republicans, you’ll love the coming attempt to rewrite the tax code. No sooner had the latest assault on President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act fallen apart than the Trump administration and Republican lawmakers unveiled what House Speaker Paul Ryan generously called a “concrete framework for tax reform.” While the proposal certainly is concrete in its ambition to significantly cut taxes for wealthy people and corporations, its implications for the rest of us, and for the federal budget, remain mushy.

Granted, like health care, U.S. tax policy offers ample room for improvement, and the Republicans’ call to simplify personal income taxes and make the corporate rate more competitive is warranted. But they have yet to explain how the overhaul would be paid for or clarify the bottom line for low- and middle-income Americans.

The president, meanwhile, suffers from a special lack of credibility on the issue. He has famously hidden his own tax returns from the public, the first president to do so in 40 years. He has also repeatedly asserted that the United States is the “highesttaxed nation in the world,” which it is not by any measure, suggesting he has little facility or concern for the intricate facts of the matter. It’s no wonder then that, as with health care, Trump has left almost all the crucial questions and details to Congress.

The framework’s clearest goals are to eliminate the estate tax and reduce the corporate tax rate from 35 to 20 percent. Despite the president’s insistence that his plan does not favor the wealthy, it would be a gift to dead multimillionaires and their heirs from a party that has made the “death tax” a bete noire for ideological and, given its donor base, practical reasons. Cutting the corporate tax rate is a more defensible goal given that it is relatively high and widely avoided, but the proposal fails to address the question of replacing or sustaining any revenue lost as a result.

The proposal’s impact on personal income taxes is harder to discern. In reducing the number of tax brackets from seven to three and lowering the top rate while raising the lowest — though the framework hedges that a higher fourth bracket “may apply”

— the proposal appears to favor wealthy taxpayers. So, in large part, would its reduction of the levy on “pass-through” business income, such as the Trump Organization’s, and the elimination of the alternative minimum tax, which forced Trump to pay $31 million more in taxes in 2005, according to the part of his tax return that was leaked.

It’s not clear, however, what incomes would be included in each of the new brackets. Moreover, the proposal would raise the standard deduction substantially and the child tax credit indeterminately while eliminating exemptions and most itemized deductions — including the one for state and local taxes, important to many Californians — further obscuring its net effects. The framework’s promise of “additional tax relief ” to make it “at least as progressive as the existing tax code” is nebulous compared with its determination to lay waste to taxes affecting the wealthy.

Though proponents have floated the familiar and questionable notion that economic growth will heal all wounds, the plan’s most glaring omission concerns how the government would pay for all this. The wisest course would be to cover the cost of rate cuts by eliminating breaks, making the overhaul revenue-neutral. Lawmakers shouldn’t cut Social Security, rack up debt, or burden the middle class to make the rich richer.

Fortunately, in contrast with the ill-considered efforts to “repeal and replace” Obamacare, the tax overhaul will face standard committee hearings and independent analysis. If lawmakers don’t use the process to make the reform fair and fiscally responsible, this project deserves to fail as spectacularly as the last one.