On the morning of November 16th, a few hours before a vast majority of Republicans in the House of Representatives voted for their party’s tax-reform plan, four Republican congressmen from New York held a press conference to express their displeasure with the bill. “A lot of the numbers we’ve seen over the last few days don’t apply to New York,” Representative Daniel Donovan, of Staten Island—the only Republican congressman from New York City—said. He and his colleagues had gathered to make a point that has become one of the sharpest criticisms of the legislation: that it penalizes states that tend to vote for Democrats over Republicans. “There was a study I saw showing four states will end up paying sixteen billion dollars more in taxes, and forty-six states will pay less,” Donovan said. “Those states are New York, New Jersey, California, and Maryland. Those are the people that are subsidizing this tax break for the rest of America.”

Donovan and others who are making this argument have focussed on the proposed elimination of tax breaks that many Americans currently take advantage of to offset state and local taxes, including property taxes. Additionally, the real-estate lobby has called attention to the proposed capping of the mortgage-interest deduction. Getting rid of these tax breaks would affect people in every state, but it would disproportionately hit residents of states with high real-estate values and local tax rates. New York, California, and other Democratic strongholds just happen to fit that description.

This blue-state argument has been persuasive—Donovan and twelve other Republicans from New York, California, New Jersey, and North Carolina bucked their party and voted against the House bill. Yet it risks missing the provision that might have the most devastating effect on middle-class taxpayers nationwide: the elimination of the personal exemption. Currently, married couples earning up to around three hundred and twenty thousand dollars in adjusted gross income can deduct a personal exemption of approximately four thousand dollars from their taxable income per family member (for self, spouse, and dependents). The elimination of these exemptions—which was part of the bill the House passed, and is part of the bill now making its way through the Senate—will translate to a roughly $1.6 trillion tax increase over the next ten years. “That is by far the single largest tax increase in the bill,” Michael Linden, a tax-policy fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, who has been studying the legislation, told me recently. Eliminating the personal exemption could affect many more families, in more parts of the country, than most critics of the bill have previously made clear to the public. This change could especially penalize families with more than one child. And while many analyses of the Republican plan have looked ahead to its effects five or ten years from now, dropping the personal exemption will have repercussions from the outset. “Looking at the first year, or couple of years, many families, especially families with children, will get a tax increase,” Linden said. “Roughly half of families with children get a tax increase, and about half get a tax cut. But for many of those who get a tax cut, it’s very small, less than a hundred dollars.”

In drafting their tax plan, Republicans set a difficult task for themselves: they wanted to introduce vast, permanent tax reductions for corporations, and significant rate reductions for those at the higher end of the income scale, while also, in theory at least, providing tax cuts for middle-class taxpayers. To pass the bill in the Senate with just fifty votes—and thus without any Democratic support—it also couldn’t add more than $1.5 trillion to the deficit. To reconcile all this, the legislation proposed eliminating or capping many deductions that people currently take. To make these concessions more palatable to the public, the bill increases the current “standard deduction” to taxpayers—which for 2018 is sixty-five hundred dollars per person and thirteen thousand dollars per couple—to around twelve thousand dollars per person and twenty-four thousand dollars per couple. While this increased standard deduction sounds good, it is not enough to make up for all of the other kinds of deductions that are being lost (or capped), including those for mortgage interest, local taxes, medical expenses, and personal exemptions. Republicans are effectively giving many taxpayers a tax break while taking it away at the same time.

When I spoke with Donovan this week, he talked through the math many taxpayers will face using the 2017 deduction limits as a starting point. “When you think about a family of four, if their standard deduction is $12,700 and they’re able to deduct over $16,200 in personal exemptions, that’s $28,900 they can deduct, right now, besides the property and other taxes,” he said. “That’s getting replaced with the new twenty-four-thousand-dollar standard deduction.” This same family might land in a lower tax bracket as part of the Republican plan, he conceded, but his calculations suggested that those benefits would not offset the deductions the family was losing, either. “It’s going to affect every American,” Donovan said. “And nobody is talking about it.” (Families with children stand to gain from a slightly higher child tax credit included in the Republican plan, but only some families will be eligible for it.)

The higher standard deduction would also greatly reduce the incentive—and, for many taxpayers, the ability—to itemize deductions. Forty-six million taxpayers currently itemize deductions, according to an estimate from the Tax Policy Center, but only thirteen million would continue doing so if the Republican plan becomes law. This could have consequences for the country’s charities and other nonprofit institutions: according to the Tax Policy Center, “the House bill would significantly reduce the tax incentive to donate, increasing the after-tax price of giving by about 8 percent.” Naturally, this is likely to lead to a significant drop in charitable donations. The T.P.C. estimates that the bill could reduce charitable donations by as much as eighteen billion dollars in 2018 alone. A related phenomenon can be expected with real-estate values, as the loss or limitation of the mortgage-interest deduction could lead to a potential correction in the middle-class housing market, as home prices typically reflect the tax benefits buyers are likely to receive on their investments.

Donovan said that he was generally supportive of his party’s goal of lowering taxes; he cited the corporate tax rate as one that was especially worthy of a significant reduction in order to give companies a financial incentive to keep jobs in America rather than outsourcing them. “I.B.M. told us last month for the first time in history that they have more employees in India than they have in the United States,” Donovan said. “That’s great for India but means less people in America are working.” But he said that he couldn’t abide the other costs of the bill, and the way that they disproportionately fall on Americans in the middle of the income spectrum.

Until now, the Republican strategy has been to offer headline-grabbing lip service to middle-class tax reductions, but taking most or all of them away through small maneuvers that are difficult to assess, in order to preserve the cuts that will benefit corporations and the wealthy. The question now, as the bill faces perhaps its toughest remaining hurdle in the Senate, is whether enough Republican senators, many of whose own constituents are likely to pay higher taxes, will notice and acknowledge what’s happening. “It is a flat-out lie that everyone gets a tax cut,” Linden told me. “There will be people who pay more in taxes in every state, in every district. The reddest state in the country, and the reddest district in that state, will have people who pay more in taxes.”