Alan D. Viard, a tax expert at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative research organization in Washington, said he and other researchers had repeatedly found that “deficit-financed tax cuts were usually harmful to growth.”

Cutting the tax on investment income, for example, delivers the most bang for the buck, Mr. Viard said, but unless the lost revenue is made up through increases in other taxes or spending cuts, the deficit will balloon and economic growth will suffer.

Previous presidents have not had a lot of success using tax cuts to spur growth. “The historical record is pretty clear that large tax cuts don’t pay for themselves through economic growth,” said Michael J. Graetz, a professor of tax law at Columbia University.

The 1981 tax cut that President Ronald Reagan pushed through did provide a short jolt to the economy, Mr. Graetz said, but he pointed out that the administration was compelled to raise taxes in 1982 and 1984 to keep the deficit under control.

Tax cuts championed by President George W. Bush in 2001 and 2003 performed even worse. While the cuts temporarily stimulated spending by putting more money in people’s pockets, they did not have much impact in enhancing the economy’s ability to produce goods and services.

Both President Trump and the House Republicans’ proposals reserve the biggest tax cuts for the wealthiest. Slashing rates at the top is probably the least effective way of spurring spending, however, because high-income households have the luxury of socking away a financial windfall, said Nariman Behravesh, chief economist at the research firm IHS Markit. The Trump plan, he said, “could well end up hurting a lot of poor people without boosting growth.”

“If you tilt the tax cuts toward lower-income households, they will spend more of it,” Mr. Behravesh said. “There is virtually no debate among economists about that.”