If there’s one accepted truism of tax reform, it’s that the way to pay for a tax cut without blowing up the deficit (or shrinking the government) is closing tax loopholes. Instead of having, for example, the 35% top corporate income tax rate but having companies pay an average of 24% because deductions make much of their profit non-taxable, we can cut out the middleman and just have the 15% rate that President Donald Trump wants.

Then we elected Trump, who will soon prove how false that is. Or try to.

The trouble with Trump’s tax reform, which published reports say will be unveiled the week of Sept. 25, is that there aren’t nearly enough corporate loopholes to offset the halving of the corporate rate that Trump and some congressional Republicans would like. Look at the biggest 10 loopholes in the tax code, and you’ll see who are the loophole-exploiting fat cats.

Mostly, you. So they’re coming for you.

It’s worth understanding the numbers.

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Cutting corporate taxes costs $100 billion to $120 billion over 10 years for every percentage point the rate comes down, says Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics. Getting to 15% means finding up to $2.4 trillion in budgets whose fiscal-2018 domestic discretionary spending is capped at about $550 billion. Corporate loopholes are nowhere near that large — Zandi says House Speaker Paul Ryan’s bill would only close $20 billion worth yearly — one reason negotiators are reportedly targeting a top rate in the 20s.

And it’s why they are looking at personal deductions — more than corporate loopholes — to close the gap. They’re hunting where the ducks are. The result isn’t a tax cut — it’s a shift of wealth to corporations and heiresses, from you. Or added to the national debt, which hit $20 trillion this very week.

“There’s no good way to significantly reduce corporate tax rates and roughly pay for it,” Zandi told me. “The only way to significantly reduce corporate rates is to scale back personal tax expenditures, a political non-starter, or to deficit-finance it, which means it will have no economic benefit. I can’t see a clear path to significant tax reform or even tax relief.”

Top tax expenditures Estimated cost in 2018 Exclusion of employer contributions for health insurance $235.8 billion Exclusion of net imputed rental income $112.7 billion Deferral of foreign corporate income $112.6 billion Capital gains preferential rate $108.6 billion Defined benefit employer plans $71.0 billion Defined contribution employer plans $69.4 billion Mortgage interest deduction $68.1 billion Earned income tax credit $63.6 billion State and local tax deduction $63.3 billion Child credit $54.3 billion Source: Tax Policy Center/Treasury Department

Of the top 10 deductions, formally known as tax expenditures, nine are on the individual side of the tax code, according to the non-partisan, mostly liberal Tax Policy Center. From the exclusion of employer-paid health insurance from taxable income, worth $235.8 billion in fiscal 2018, at #1, to the child tax credit at #10 (at $54 billion in lost revenue, compared with the same income being taxed at ordinary rates), it’s all about you.

The only corporate deduction in the top 10 is deferral of profits made offshore by U.S. corporations, which the GOP would like to replace entirely. It’s not clear yet how much U.S. tax, if any, the proposal will call for U.S. companies to pay on offshore operations.

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Add them up, and you get $846 billion worth of loopholes for us, and $112.6 billion for corporations in the top 10 tax expenditures. Bonus: TPC’s list excludes the earned income credit for the working class, valued at $64 billion by the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation.

By contrast, limiting deductibility of business interest would only bring in about $6 billion a year, according to the Congressional Budget Office. That’s the highest-profile loophole Corporate America is likely to lose.

It’s also worth noting that most big individual breaks aren’t skewed to the 1%, according to the JCT.

The $42.5 billion exclusion of Social Security and railroad pension benefits is used most often by people earning $50,000 to $75,000 and saves people making $100,000 to $200,000 the most in taxes. About a third of mortgage-interest deduction savings goes to people making $100,000 to $200,000 — but the $3.7 billion saved by filers earning $50,000 to $75,000 approaches the cost of the corporate interest deduction. Excluding state and local income taxes from federally taxable income saves people making $75,000 to $100,000 about $500 per itemized return.

It’s no secret that middle-class loopholes are first on the block.

No one expects Republicans to raise taxes on capital gains and dividends to rates on wages. That $135 billion stays untouched. Ditto $35 billion of revenue lost by letting taxpayers “step up” the capital-gains basis of inherited property to its value upon death, rather than when the decedent bought the property — holding down the inheritance taxes that only 4,700 estates paid in 2013. Indeed, the GOP wants to repeal the inheritance tax, shifting another $20 billion yearly to people inheriting estates larger than $5.5 million.

Get the picture?

Instead, what’s likely to pay for corporate-tax cuts includes individual exclusions for state and local taxes, part of the mortgage deduction, and favorable treatment for Individual Retirement Accounts and 401(k) retirement plan contributions, according to published reports.

These are things the president doesn’t mention in speeches devoting nine times as many paragraphs to corporate rates than individual taxes.

Imagine that.