"This is the LARGEST tax cut in Louisiana's history!" Republican Gov. Jeff Landry proclaimed Thursday on X.

If that sounds like a boast you've heard before, it could be that you're recalling similar chest-thumping from Bobby Jindal, Louisiana's most recent Republican ex-governor, after he signed the repeal of the Stelly income tax increases in 2008.

You might also be tempted to think that Landry is following Jindal's example on the subject.

There, you'd be wrong.

There's no mystery over why Landry is publicizing the easy part of the tax package he's hoping to ram through the Legislature during the short special session. Cutting taxes is the brass ring in conservative politics, and Landry absolutely wants to be known as someone who grabbed it.

The supermajority Republican state House is very much on the same page and passed bills cutting individual and corporate income taxes to the tune of $1.9 billion a year.

But developments in the House later Thursday point to a more complicated situation and a bigger challenge.

Landry's triumphant post left out a key word: "net." It didn't factor in that he also proposes to raise other taxes to offset much of that "LARGEST tax cut" in the state's history. His goal here is less to change the bottom line than to shift the burden.

Where that stands right now is up in the air.

Thursday the governor narrowly got the two-thirds support he needs to extend most of the temporary sales tax adopted under Democratic predecessor John Bel Edwards, although lawmakers added a number of carve-outs. But he fell just short on adding sales taxes to a host of services that are not now taxed amid concerns they'd do things like make home repairs more expensive and put new obligations on small businesses.

The lesson for the day is clearly that it's easier to cut taxes than to raise them.

But a larger lesson is that Landry's not trying to pull off what Jindal did when he abandoned his initial misgivings and signed his big income tax cut, in a maneuver that headed off an even more Draconian drive by conservative lawmakers to eliminate the state income tax entirely.

The coffers were flush back then, so the state could have absorbed the cost in the moment. But things soon headed south, and the compromise that Jindal was initially forced to accept -- which he eventually embraced as he planned his ill-fated presidential bid -- proved devastating.

Even after raiding one-time money to pay recurring expenses and cutting things like higher education, Jindal still left behind a $2 billion budgetary hole, a 20% approval rating and a Democrat elected by his Republican-leaning constituents to try to clean up the mess.

Edwards -- who as a rookie legislator had naively voted for the big Jindal tax cut -- mostly did that, with the help of the hard-won temporary sales tax Landry now wants to make permanent.

Like Landry's social media post, much of his package is on brand. Even with an increased standard deduction that benefits lower income residents, switching from a slightly graduated personal income tax structure to a flat tax is a conservative policy goal, one that puts more money into the hands of wealthier people. So is the steep reduction in the corporate income rate.

But Landry's also showing no sign of chasing Jindalesque austerity. Nor, frankly, are the lawmakers with the longest memories.

The rhetoric that the flat tax will eventually lead to the elimination of the income tax is just that, rhetoric. If there were a plan to get there, Landry would have included it in his package.

And in truth, while systemic tax reform is overdue, Landry still hasn't made a great case for making huge changes in a brief special session instead of in the spring regular session, when they can be more carefully studied and fully debated. All lawmakers really need to do to avert immediate catastrophe is make the temporary tax permanent.

But the fact that he's trying to keep revenue from cratering in the first place suggests Landry did learn from watching what happened when Jindal threw off his doubts and followed the ideological path to disaster.

The governor has already made plenty of mistakes in office and he'll surely make more. But he seems pretty determined not to repeat that one.