Moderator John Harwood of CNBC then cut Mnuchin off, asking him simply if the administration's intent “would then be a middle-income tax cut and a zero tax cut for people at the top.” Mnuchin’s response: “Again, what I said is the president’s priority has been not cutting taxes for the high end. His priority is about creating a middle-income tax cut. So we'll see where it comes out.”

And if it comes out that instead of “no absolute tax cut for the upper class” the bill provides an absolutely massive, multitrillion-dollar boost to the upper class, blame it on Congress! President Trump, for one, would never even dream about passing such thing, though if it comes across his desk, far be it for him not to sign it.

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Trump’s budget long on cruelty, short on math

The Trump administration released its 2018 fiscal budget plan Tuesday and although it’s already “been declared dead on arrival by many of his Republican allies in Congress,” just for yuks, let’s take a peek at what it entails.

For starters, there are the ample middle fingers to the people who voted for him, including another $610 billion cut to Medicaid, $193 billion from food stamps, and $72 billion from a Social Security program that “provide[s] cash benefits for the poor and disabled.” As Bloomberg notes, “states that Trump carried in the presidential election are high on the list of those that spent the most federal money for Medicaid in 2016,” while “among the top 25 states for proportion of households receiving food stamps, Trump won 16 of them.”

Naturally, the plan also flips off the environment and climate-change believers, with the budget for the Environmental Protection Agency being slashed by 31.4 percent. The plan specifically calls for “eliminating funding to every program to deal with global warming, including the Clean Power Plan.” The budget for the Department of Education, run by a woman who has seemingly never set foot in a public school, would be cut by $9 billion. Subsidies to farmers would be sharply curtailed; the National Institute of Health‘s budget would be slashed from $31.8 billion to $26 billion; and the Centers for Disease Control would lose $1.2 billion in funding.

Beyond its obvious callousness, the White House budget proposal also stands for its brazen use of accounting tricks to make its math add up. In its plan, the administration claims that massive tax cuts will pay for themselves by generating some $2 trillion in additional economic growth—a dubious assertion to start with, according to most economists—and then claims that same $2 trillion can also be used to balance the budget in 10 years. As a number of commentators quickly pointed out, the White House used the same magic $2 trillion in trickle-down fairy dust twice.