House Republicans finally rolled out their proposed tax plan on Thursday, after they spent the preceding couple of days hashing out, well, most of the details, from the sounds of it. Much of what the bill includes is exactly what you'd expect: Big cuts in the taxes paid by corporations and the wealthiest Americans, along with the elimination of tax breaks that mostly benefit people in the blue states and cities that conservatives don't believe are real America.

"This is our opportunity to make tax reform a reality," said House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Kevin Brady, R-Texas, at the bill's official unveiling, and the rest of the House leadership was no less giddy.

The only thing missing was a real rationale for the whole thing.

First, the details of what's called "The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act": The bill includes a reduction in the corporate tax rate from 35 to 20 percent and a phase-out of the estate tax leveled on wealthy heirs. It pushes the threshold for the highest income tax bracket up to $1 million, expands the standard income tax deduction, and also expands the child tax credit, all ideas it seemed probable the GOP would embrace.

On the flip side, Republicans are proposing to eliminate the ability to deduct state and local income taxes or student loan interest from federal tax bills, cap the mortgage interest deduction for new home purchases at $500,000 (down from its current $1 million) and eliminate the adoption tax credit. The bill also would impose a complicated new formula to govern what are known as "pass through" businesses, which are businesses where the owners don't pay corporate income tax, but instead pay for the profits on their own individual tax returns. Some of the ideas floated in previous days, such as capping 401(k) deductions, didn't make the cut.

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The GOP hopes to rush this thing through both houses of Congress before the holidays, based on the pervasive belief that failure to record a policy "win" before 2018 leaves the party vulnerable in that year's midterm elections. The House Ways and Means Committee intends to start considering the plan next week.

On the surface, the rush to slap something together and bang it through Congress before the new year doesn't make a whole lot of sense. There's no, per the polling anyway, clamor for tax cuts from voters. In fact, most polls show a distinct distaste for corporate tax cuts, a centerpiece of the plan, or for reducing taxes on the already well-off. America, remember, is actually a low-tax country by developed world standards; most Americans think their taxes are pretty fair.

But since the collapse of the GOP's effort to repeal Obamacare, the party has been desperate to get something, anything, of consequence across the finish line. Since the only thing the party's disparate factions can really agree on is tax cuts, tax cuts it shall be, whether they're needed or not.

Of course, the story Republicans will tell is that the bill will juice the economy, turbocharging economic growth and job creation. (And even though Republicans spent the eight years of the Obama administration saying any economic stimulus measure was too expensive, they're now perfectly fine putting at least $1.5 trillion on the national credit card in the name of tax cuts.) There's little reason to think that said juicing will actually happen, though.

After all, as I noted recently, we've tried all this before. The Bush tax cuts didn't unleash the economic nirvana they were supposed to, while both the Clinton and Obama tax increases didn't cause the economic devastation conservatives claimed they would. Overall, the evidence that cutting federal taxes unleashes growth is thin to nonexistent. And with unemployment already at 4 percent, how much lower do Republicans think it's going to go?

On the corporate side, the case for what the GOP wants is even worse. Corporations are already making near record-high profits. Why would a bit more cash in the bank make them more prone to hire than they already are? Businesses hire when they have more customers, not more money in the vault.

In fact, historically there's no correlation between lower corporate tax rates and economic growth. Republicans like to claim that America's corporate tax rate is the highest in the world, and while that's true on paper, there are so many other deductions and giveaways that American companies pay at a rate that's right in line with the rest of the world. So the big corporate tax cut will likely be a big dud.

In the grander sense, this bill does nothing to address the sort of economic issues America faces in the 21st century. The country's revenue problems are real and are going to get worse as the population ages. Automation is going to potentially take more and more jobs than it already has. The shift from a manufacturing to a service-based economy has done real damage in large swathes of the country, and the education system is being allowed to rot from the inside. Tax cuts do nothing to move toward a solution on any of those real concerns.

We'll know more in the coming days and weeks as to the exact effects the bill would have on particular groups of taxpayers, as the analysts and number-crunchers do their thing. The Senate is also going to unveil its own legislation, and some of the House's ideas aren't going to fly in the upper chamber. And there's every reason to think that this whole thing will come crashing down – as did the failed repeal of Obamacare – when the fissures in the GOP and the disagreements in the business community over this bill become too wide to bridge.