Back when congressional Republicans were rolling out one unpopular health care bill after another, it was a challenge to come up with constructive advice on how to fix their efforts. That’s because Republicans had set themselves an impossible task with health reform: They were trying to do something sweeping enough to be called “repeal,” modest enough to keep most of Obamacare’s beneficiaries on the insurance rolls and also money-saving enough to provide some extra budget room for the eternal dream of tax cuts. No plan could satisfy all three requirements; as they say in Susan Collins’s Maine, you can’t get there from here.

With the tax reform that the House and the Senate are now considering, though, the task of advice-giving is easier. For one thing, this time there is no longstanding “repeal” promise that the base demands Republicans fulfill; there’s just the generic promise to cut taxes that every Republican politician makes. For another, the party has decided not to even try to for deficit-neutrality (taking my advice, so send your angry deficit-hawk missives to my address in, ah, Manitoba), giving themselves $1.5 trillion over 10 years to play with and no inherent requirement to offset any of their cuts.

Sadly, despite this simplifying improvidence, the G.O.P. still ended up with a pair of bills that look, once again, like the caricature of Reagan-era Republicanism the party has become: heavy with tax cuts for corporations and the heirs of millionaires, lighter on relief for the middle class, lighter still for the working class, with a complicated slew of provisions and score-gaming expiration dates that have made it hard to discern whether lots of non-rich Americans (including the plan’s supposed model beneficiary, a family making $60,000 with multiple kids) even get a tax cut at all.

But if the initial House and Senate bills were flawed, it’s also been very easy to see what would make them better. The Republicans seem to be trying, in their none-too-competent and ideologically straitjacketed way, to cut taxes for two major constituencies, employers and middle-class families, while paying for some of these tax cuts by goring well-off professionals in high-tax liberal states.