Peter Suderman calls the tax bill “a predictable, conventional piece of Republican tax legislation” in that it cuts taxes for corporations and individuals while increasing future deficits. I’ve read a lot of commentary to that effect–you might even call it conventional wisdom. That conventional wisdom is not completely wrong. But let me push back against it a little.

It’s true that one could have predicted that Republicans would try to cut the corporate tax rate if the 2016 elections went their way. But it’s not as though they do it every time they are in power. The last time corporate tax rates were cut was in 1986. Under President Bush, Republicans enacted two large tax cuts, in 2001 and 2003, that did not include cuts in corporate tax rates.

The tax cut bill is also different from those of 1981, 1997, 2001, and 2003 in including some discrete tax increases–notably the cap on the deduction for state and local taxes, the lower cap on the deduction for mortgage interest, and the abolition of the personal and dependent exemption. The tax reform of 1986 also included such tax increases–gross tax increases, that is, rather than net ones–but it was a bipartisan product. Republicans haven’t tried to scale back tax breaks on their own before. (The Reagan administration wanted to go after the state-and-local deduction in the 1986 reform but lost the fight.)