While the Trump administration has proven to be adept at emboldening white supremacists and authoring unhinged tweets, it has struggled mightily to pass legislation or do any of the work associated with the task of governing. As the midterm elections draw nearer, party luminaries can point only to the tax reform bill, which Paul Ryan dragged to the White House last fall in a desperate failed attempt to secure his legacy, as they make their pitch to voters. There is only one problem with this strategy: The tax reform bill is, as expected, a giant reverse Robin Hood scam that delivers on none of the Republican Party's loftiest promises.

Six months after the bill's enactment, real wages are down slightly and appear to be getting worse, says economist Noah Smith at Bloomberg, whose charts on the subject feature titles like "Not Very Convincing," "That's Not Very Pretty," and "Very Meh." While business investment is up slightly, the increase isn't notable compared to those observed in previous years. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, Smith concludes, is not going to pay for itself, as Ryan and company asserted that it would—a failure, he adds, which suggests that the decades-old practice of slashing taxes to jump-start economic growth has reached the outer limits of its alleged efficacy, and should be retired for good.

In the postwar period, with top marginal income tax rates at more than 90 percent, it made sense to cut taxes as a way of improving the economy’s long-term health... But the later tax cuts by George W. Bush were followed by years of underwhelming growth, implying that income taxes were no longer doing much damage to economic efficiency.

Corporate taxes were really the last hope for the tax-cutting strategy. But if even that doesn’t provide more than a small momentary fiscal stimulus, then we’ve reached the end of that approach’s usefulness.

If these trends continue, it is disastrous for the conservative movement: the excuse they've cited for decades to explain why their trickle-down policy preferences just happen to disproportionately benefit wealthy people, at last reduced to a smoldering, empirically-backed pile of rubble. In any other era, the governing party's brain trust would respond by holding an emergency conclave to craft an intricate messaging strategy, one that at once glosses effortlessly over this failure and touts the myriad benefits of their other significant legislative accomplishments.

Without any such accomplishments to their name, though, Republicans in 2018 are stuck with an absurd set of talking points that make only the slightest bit of sense if no one who hears them is capable of doing basic math. In an op-ed published on Sunday in the Philadelphia Inquirer, Vice President Pence credited the tax bill with "bigger pay raises, better benefits, and cash bonuses" for "73,000 Pennsylvanians." This sounds like a lot, until you are remember that there are an estimated 12.8 million Pennsylvanians, and that a bill that enriches 0.57 percent of them does not bode well for this president's brand of economic populism.

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Still Making Excuses for Trump?

None of these calculations matter to those who love Donald Trump, and who have always loved Donald Trump, and for whom his occasional forays into prostrating himself before murderous dictators could never convince them to feel anything else. His handlers understand that appeals to emotion can be far more powerful than appeals to fact, especially when the operative facts do not comport with the way in which one elects to perceive the world. The president's willingness to embrace things like racism and xenophobia ensures that his loudest followers will always be his most loyal ones, too.

But there are Americans who voted Republican in 2016 who are not party lifers, and who made their choice because Trump and Ryan pledged that they would fix this country's devastating economic inequality, if only they had the chance. In places like Pennsylvania, which Trump won by 45,000 votes—a little over half the alleged number of that state's beneficiaries—the precise ways in which two years of GOP rule have affected people's lives matter a lot. The challenge for Republicans is persuading these constituents that they were right to back Trump, and that they should reward him with another friendly House and Senate so that he can finish the work he started. Trump and Pence and Paul Ryan's replacement will have to come up with something other than the tax bill, because it is hard to conclude that the elected officials singing its praises are anything other than liars, rubes, or both.