President Donald Trump hit the road on Thursday to start selling a new GOP tax reform push. Unlike his mostly unhelpful efforts during the recent health care debate, the idea here is that a Trumpian road show will build momentum for what Republicans view as a desperately needed legislative win.

Speaking in Springfield, Missouri, Trump provided few details about his preferred tax overhaul, fulfilling expectations that the dirty work will largely be left to Congress. Instead, he sought to portray whatever the GOP eventually cooks up as an integral part of, as his hats says, making American great again via “pro-American tax reform.”

“Our tax system should benefit loyal, hardworking Americans and their families. That is why tax reform must dramatically simplify the tax code [and] eliminate special interest loopholes,” he said, while intimating that the eventual plan would be bad for him personally. “It’s time to give American workers the pay raise they’ve been looking for for many many years.” Later he said that the ultimate goal was to put “more money into the pockets of everyday, hardworking people.”

Don’t buy this shtick for a second. Unless Trump and the Republican Congress do a radical about-face on the last several decades of conservative tax policy orthodoxy, what’s coming down the pike isn’t a worker-friendly push to reform a broken tax code, but the same old tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans that the GOP always calls for, just warmed over for the Trump era. It’s not “reform,” if that word has any actual meaning. It’s just tax breaks for the rich, with #MAGA stamped on the side.

Remember, Trump has already had ample opportunity to make his preferences for tax policy known. During the campaign, he released a plan that was the usual Republican supply-side pablum on steroids, costing some $6 trillion over a decade while giving the wealthiest of the wealthy an absurd break; it would have saved multimillionaires a million dollars a year, at least.

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There was no “reform,” in the traditional sense of paring away tax preferences and loopholes in order to cover the revenue lost from reducing tax rates – it was just a big, whopping tax cut for the most well-off among us.

Upon taking office, Trump's team did the exact same thing: It made a lot of noise about putting out a new tax plan that would be so very great, and but when the plan finally came out it was the equivalent of writing “cut taxes for rich folks” on the back of a napkin.

Every time Trump had a chance to flesh out what his tax policy would look like, then, he’s hewed to the same sort of stuff the George W. Bush administration banked on to boost the economy, and the same sort of thing Republicans in Congress always want. But it didn’t work then, and it won’t work now. To claim it’s some radical rethinking of American tax policy is simply a joke, or a cynical attempt to appease big money interests while framing it as doing the working class a favor. Just look at the mess in Kansas, for a recent example of what this sort of thinking has wrought here in the real world.

And that’s just on the personal tax side. The corporate side of Trump’s sales job is also a charade.

During the speech, Trump called for cutting the corporate tax rate to 15 percent from its current top rate of 35 percent, rattling off a list of nations that have lower statutory rates than does the U.S. “When it comes to the business tax, we are dead last. Can you believe that?” he asked. “We have totally surrendered our competitive edge to other countries.”

To be clear, while America has, on paper, the highest corporate tax rate in the world, the plethora of giveaways, deductions and other nonsense in the tax code lower that headline rate dramatically, putting the country largely in line with the kind of nations with whom we compete. In fact, as a percentage of the economy, U.S. corporate tax revenue is below average for a developed country.

So already, the premise of Trump’s plan is largely out of touch with the facts. Meanwhile, there’s a host of evidence that lowering the corporate tax rate does little to boost jobs or income – it just lets corporate executives stuff a little more cash into the pockets.

That finding actually makes sense if you think about it for more than a second: Lower taxes on corporate profits doesn’t translate into more customers for any particular business, which is the ultimate arbiter of whether or not that business will expand. Cutting corporate taxes to entice those corporations to create more jobs gets the equation precisely backward. If you want more jobs, you need to help the people who are going to be buying stuff, not those rich folks or corporations who already have ample money to spend and will stuff whatever windfall they receive in a Swiss bank account.

A new report from the Institute of Policy Studies that’s been making the rounds this week backs up that exact point: The companies with the lowest taxes aren’t expanding their workforces. In fact, they are more likely to cut jobs, and funnel money back to their executives.

Finally, Trump endorsed an idea that would allow companies to bring their overseas money back to the U.S. via a humongous tax break. It’s a bad plan that the Bush administration actually tried, to terrible effect, back in 2004. Doing it again would literally be making the same tax policy mistake twice in less than two decades.