To sell their tax plan, congressional Republicans and the Trump administration have constructed an impressive alternate reality: Getting rid of the estate tax is great for farmers! If the bill passes as written, Donald Trump will “get killed” financially! Tax cuts will pay for themselves! Trickle-down economics works! But on Thursday night, the G.O.P. came face to face with something they can’t fib their way out of, and that could very well doom their holy grail: math. While it was fairly obvious from the start that the plan put forth by the Senate would blow a hole in the deficit, violating Senate rules, it wasn’t until last night that the size of that hole became evident. According to the official score released by Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation, the bill would add $1.5 trillion to federal budget deficits over the next 10 years, with the biggest annual deficit, $216.7 billion, occurring in 2027.

This is a major problem because, in order for the bill to pass the Senate with a simple majority, parliamentary rules require the legislation does not produce any revenue losses after a decade. While Mitch McConnell and Co. will insist that the final version is still being hammered out, this isn’t a matter of coming up with a few billion here and there. The deficit Republicans are grappling with is so massive that even dropping the corporate tax cut—the heart and soul of the G.O.P. plan—wouldn’t be enough to offset revenue losses elsewhere.

Senate Republicans, desperately scrounging among the nation’s couch pillows for loose change, have located about $1 trillion they believe they can raise by scrapping state and local tax deductions. But numerous House Republicans in high-tax blue states, which would be disproportionately affected by the change, have said that would be a nonstarter. So what’s a party that’s hung its electoral hopes and dreams on tax cuts to do?

One way Senate Republicans could subvert reality would be to ask someone like Reaganite Larry Kudlow to score their bill, knowing full well that he’ll tell them it will produce more revenue through growth, thereby skirting the so-called Byrd Rule. Or they could rip up the bill and re-write it so that, say, instead of phasing tax cuts out after 10 years if they add to the deficit, they’re phased out after 40. Either option, however, would mark a radical revision of parliamentary rules—something that Mitch McConnell and his colleagues, for all their procedural improprieties, are loathe to do. And changing the rules so that the majority party can, effectively, pass whatever it wants, is probably not a great idea when Democrats, fresh off major electoral victories in Virginia and New Jersey, are hoping to recapture Congress in 2018.

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Entitlement reform next?

If Republicans can get their collective act together and find a way to cut taxes, G.O.P. logic dictates that “entitlements,” as Paul Ryan affectionally refers to them, may be next: