The vague outline of a "tax-cut plan" that the Trump administration unveiled Wednesday was intended to provide an illusion of achievement on the 97th day of Donald Trump's presidency. It demonstrated just the opposite.

This man who loves bullet points proposed radical change to the hideously complicated U.S. tax code in a one-page list of 12 bullet points. The last of them promised cooperation with Congress to develop details. In effect, Trump proposed a banana split with the bananas, ice cream and toppings to come later.

Nevertheless, the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center found enough in this broad outline to say it would hugely benefit the wealthy, who'd see tax cuts averaging 13.5 percent. It would modestly benefit the middle class, who might see cuts of 2 percent, except for single-parent households and married couples with three or more children, who'd pay more.

Overall biggest winners: Corporations, already making near-record profits, which would see their top marginal tax rate fall from 35 percent to 15 percent. Companies employ tax specialists who whittle the average down to about 19 percent. Payments by corporations cover only 10 percent of all federal income taxes, as compared with 33 percent in 1952.

Biggest individual winners: billionaires and multimillionaires, like Trump himself, who would see their top tax rate lowered to 35 percent from 39.6 percent, but who would also be freed from paying the alternative minimum tax. The AMT was designed so that even after exploiting loopholes, wealthy people had to pay something. In 2005, the only year for which Trump's tax payments have been revealed, the AMT amounted to 80 percent of his $38 million tax bill.

The Trump tax plan could usher in the mother of all loopholes. People, like Trump himself, who own so-called "pass-through" companies (partnerships and limited liability corporations, for example) treat business income as personal income. Under the Trump plan, self-employed Americans could incorporate and be taxed at 15 percent, rather than pay higher personal rates.

The estate tax, levied only on estates of more than $5.45 million, also would go away. Republicans have said it devastates small family farms and businesses; in fact, relatively few of them are ever affected.

The biggest canard about the tax cut plan is its fundamental reason for being: The idea that it will pay for itself with increased growth as corporations build more factories and create more jobs and individuals buy more stuff. This is the famous discredited theory of supply-side economics.

Conservative economist Greg Mankiw of Harvard estimates that at best, only about a third of the cost of tax cuts is recovered through increased growth. The rest, as much as $7 trillion in the next 10 years, would be added to the national debt. Republicans used to worry about debt. Not in the Trump era.

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