The Camp bill never even made it to the House floor.

“You can’t just go back to 1986 today,” said Michael J. Graetz, a professor and tax specialist at Columbia and Yale law schools who has written extensively about the 1986 act. Then, there were numerous tax shelters, loopholes and other sources of revenue. Today, “there’s no pot of gold to pay for the cuts, the way there was back in 1986,” Mr. Graetz said.

Even though it nominally cut corporate rates, the 1986 act actually shifted much of the tax burden from individuals to corporations. That’s not feasible today, where lowering the tax burden on corporations is a major goal.

That was a reality that Mr. Camp had to confront. “The Camp plan turned out to be a reality test,” Mr. Graetz said. “There was a lot of pain in the Camp bill in terms of eliminating tax deductions and credits. And that only got you to a 25 percent corporate rate. President Obama used to say he could get us to 28 percent, also with a lot of pain. But it’s hard to get the business community excited about 28 percent or 25 percent, especially now that the U.K. is moving to 17 percent and Canada is close to that.”

And Mr. Camp’s plan wasn’t able to lower individual rates much at all — devising three brackets, taxed at 10 percent, 25 percent and 35 percent. But it phased out certain deductions and exemptions for people making over $400,000 a year. The Tax Foundation calculated that some taxpayers making more than $400,000 would pay a marginal rate as high as 43.8 percent, in effect a tax increase on the wealthy. It also hit rich taxpayers by lowering the cap on mortgage deductions to $500,000, from $1 million.

And the Camp plan actually raised the top effective rate on capital gains and dividends to 24.8 percent, from 23.8 percent, according to the Tax Foundation.

That was anathema to many Republicans.

Some of the “pain” inflicted by the Camp plan also hits especially close to the Trump White House, since it proposed closing some of the biggest loopholes for real estate developers. Mr. Camp’s plan eliminated the break for so-called like-kind exchanges, which many real estate developers use to delay or avoid capital gains tax.

And the Camp plan proposed longer depreciation schedules, reducing the deductions that businesses can take for capital investment and thus increasing taxes for most real estate developers. The Trump plan calls for immediate expensing of 100 percent of capital costs, eliminating depreciation altogether — an enormous windfall for real estate interests.