Here is where the problem arises. Once the pass-through rate is substantially below the tax rate for high-income wage earners, those wage earners have an incentive to reorganize themselves as pass-throughs.

Consider, for example, a physician employed by a hospital. She would have an incentive to quit and then sell her services back to the hospital as a freelance doctor. She performs the same services and receives the same payment. But now she is a sole proprietor rather than an employee, saving a substantial amount in taxes. (Disclosure: I am a freelancer for The New York Times, so my “writing business” might qualify, too.)

The Trump tax team says that it will write regulations to preclude this kind of tax avoidance (and the House bill includes some rules to mitigate the problem). But the task will be difficult at best and perhaps impossible. At the very least, such regulations would further complicate a tax system that is already too complex.

There is, however, an easy solution: Cut personal income taxes at the same time. As long as the top tax rate on personal income is close to the tax rate on pass-through entities, the incentive to reorganize to avoid taxes will be minimal.

This solution has two obvious problems of its own, but both of these can be solved.

The first problem is that the cuts I am suggesting would lose too much revenue. Yet the government can start raising revenue with other, better tax instruments. My first choice would be a tax on carbon emissions, which would both raise revenue and address the challenge of climate change. A close second would be a broad-based tax on consumption, such as the value-added taxes used in many other countries.

The second problem is that, depending on your political philosophy, my proposals might be seen as insufficiently redistributive. In other words, they wouldn’t do much, in themselves, to address wealth and income inequality. But redistribution can be added back in various ways.

One would be to expand the earned-income tax credit and the child tax credit, which benefit lower-income families. Another, more radical idea would be to use some of the revenue from the carbon tax and consumption tax to offer all Americans a monthly lump-sum dividend, along the lines of a universal basic income.