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House Republicans were supposed to unveil their tax proposal today, but it has been put off — and not, as you might imagine, because they’re a bit worried that their grand opening might be overshadowed by the indictment of Trump’s campaign manager and sworn testimony of collusion between campaign officials and Russia.

No, they’re delaying because on the verge of trying to pass a huge change in the U.S. tax system, they still haven’t settled on key parts of the proposal — specifically, how to pay for huge corporate tax cuts and large cuts to wealthy individuals.

But wait — how is this possible? Republicans, and specifically Paul Ryan, the speaker of the House, have been talking about tax “reform” and putting out white papers for years — actually, since 2010. How can basic things be up in the air at this late date?

The answer, of course, is that Ryan and friends have been faking it all these years. This was obvious from the beginning. I identified Ryan as a flimflam man more than 7 years ago. And the reason I knew he was a phony was that he was proposing large tax cuts while asserting that the lost revenue would be made up for by closing unspecified loopholes.

A couple of years later, Howard Gleckman of the Tax Policy Center complained about the “mystery meat” in Ryan’s budget — the huge revenue gains assumed from eliminating unspecified tax preferences:

Ryan proposes big, specific spending reductions such as cutting Medicaid in half and slashing other federal spending (except for Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid) by nearly 75 percent from current levels by 2050. But his budget still can’t add up without eliminating or sharply scaling back those popular tax preferences. Which ones, it seems, remain a state secret.

And they’re still a state secret — on the day the House was supposed to release its plan, we still have no idea what will be used as “pay-fors”.

Now, a cynic might have expected Republicans to go for full-on cynicism: “What, you took it seriously when we talked about fiscal responsibility? The joke’s on you! Ha ha ha!” And to a certain extent that is what they’ve done: after all the deficit-hawk posturing, they’re openly admitting that their intention is to increase the deficit by $1.5 trillion.

But they apparently didn’t feel free to cut completely loose: they did set a deficit target, and as I understand the mechanics of reconciliation, the budgets passed by the House and Senate, while they don’t actually set policy, kind of leave them stuck with an upper limit on just how much they can blow up the deficit.

And they have no idea how to get there. Try to cut one set of deductions, and the homebuilders get mad at you. Try to cut another, and upper-middle-class suburbanites in blue states who still vote GOP get mad. And so on.

The point is that these problems were always predictable, which is why the Ryan budgets were always obviously fraudulent. Ryan’s fakery may have fooled his naive constituents — by which I mean practically the whole Beltway pundit class — but never fooled anyone who could do the math.

So will the GOP pass something? Probably — but it’s more likely to be a miniature Christmas tree of handouts to the wealthy than the grand tax reform they’ve been promising.

And let’s hope that whatever happens gets reported as the failure it is. Ryan and company promised big stuff, but never had any way to deliver. When it comes to big lies, Donald Trump is actually a very good, very normal Republican.