On Wednesday, President Donald Trump and the Republican congressional leadership plan to unveil their long-awaited tax-cut plans.

Reports say the goal is to cut the corporate tax rate to 20% (the president wants 15%) from the current statutory federal rate of 35%; reduce the number of individual tax brackets to three from the current seven, and perhaps cut the top individual marginal rate to 35% from its current 39.6%.

We’ll surely hear about how these tax cuts will boost economic growth and create thousands of well-paying jobs in the U.S. But we’re not likely to hear much about how Congress or the Trump administration expects to pay for them, because the simple fact is, they can’t, without taking on powerful special interests.

Trump's Simple Tax-Overhaul Pitch: Jobs

So, sacred cows like charitable contributions and the mortgage-interest deduction are probably safe. But deductibility of state and local taxes may be capped or eliminated. That would really stick it to upper-middle-class taxpayers in blue states like New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and California, which voted heavily for Hillary Clinton in 2016.

If that’s included — and the fight over it will be fierce — it might cover half of the tax cuts’ estimated $1.5 trillion in lost revenue over 10 years. But the cuts may wind up a lot bigger and the revenue gap a lot wider.

And no, Larry Kudlow and Stephen Moore, they won’t “pay for themselves”; the U.S. government will have to borrow that money, just as it did after the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts.

That means the national debt will continue to grow, despite all the promises of Trump and the Republican Party leadership, who have been as adamant about the ballooning debt for the past six or seven years as they were about repealing and replacing Obamacare.

In June, the Congressional Budget Office projected that the debt would rise by more than $10 trillion over the next 10 years. Since total federal debt now tops $20 trillion, it would likely exceed $30 trillion by the end of fiscal 2027, when the deficit alone would hit $1.4 trillion.

Growth in entitlement spending will drive a lot of that, as more Baby Boomers retire and get Social Security and Medicare. The CBO also expects interest expenses to rise along with rates. (It assumes average annual economic growth of around 2% through 2027.)

The point is, unpaid-for tax cuts add as much to the national debt as food stamps or disability payments or other benefits for “undeserving” people. But Republicans won’t insist on spending cuts to offset the lost revenue, as they used to do when President Barack Obama was in the White House.

Why? Because they still believe in the self-serving fantasy that tax cuts stimulate economic growth and create jobs. This notion has been debunked so thoroughly I shouldn’t have to discuss it, but consider:

The economy did grow quickly after the Reagan tax cuts and 13.6 million jobs were created during his administration. But the top marginal rate plunged from 70% to 28% at the same time Paul Volcker and the Federal Reserve slashed interest rates from 19.1% to under 6%. Which mattered more? Who knows?

Under President Bill Clinton, taxes increased, but growth averaged almost 4%, nearly 20 million new jobs were created, and disposable income rose by 3.6% a year, the same as under Reagan. And the U.S. achieved a budget surplus for four consecutive years.

The Bush tax cuts cost the U.S. Treasury an estimated $1 trillion, with little to show for it: I estimated they may have created 2 million jobs, and many of those almost surely disappeared in the Great Recession, which started on his watch.

We’ve had much less experience with corporate tax cuts, but when the Bush administration allowed companies to repatriate cash from overseas at a tax rate of 5.25%, 92% of the $299 billion the companies brought home went to shareholders, mostly in dividends and share buybacks. There’s no guarantee the savings from any tax cuts will go to job creation this time, either.

I actually think we should cut corporate taxes; our average effective rate of 29% is far too high, and our tax code is too complicated. But let’s make sure we pay for it by cutting special exemptions and loopholes for corporations and the super-rich.

And Democrats have shown no concern about the debt whatsoever: 16 Democratic senators have followed pied piper Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) down the path of single-payer health care, which would be like Medicare on amphetamines for the national debt.

But this has been a central Republican issue for years and one Trump repeated endlessly on the campaign trail. Now that they’re in control in Washington, they will own the growing national debt just as much as they now own Obamacare. Let’s see how serious they are about really fixing the problem, now that it’s theirs.