Nero fiddled while Rome burned. Trump golfs — at Trump-branded properties — while working-class parents see their children’s dreams of affordable college go up in smoke. This brings me to tax reform, which has taken shape in ways that hardly prioritize struggling Americans who are trying to climb the economic ladder a rung or two.

There is arguably no engine of advancement as powerful as a college degree, so what does the tax bill passed by the House do? At a time of mammoth student debt, it eliminates the deduction for interest on student loans.

My Times colleague Erica Green noted that it also taxes the value of college tuition benefits that thousands of university employees receive. She described one such employee, Fred Vautour, who worked a graveyard shift collecting trash and scrubbing toilets at Boston College in order to send all five of his children to school there. The House bill’s proposed changes would make a success story like his much less possible, but it would do away altogether with the estate tax, so that a billionaire like Trump could pass down the entirety of his wealth to Ivanka and the rest of the brood. So much for the little people.

While it’s true that simplification of the tax code was in order and had to come from somewhere, how can reformers justify erasing the $250 deduction for teachers who reach into their own pockets to buy school supplies but not getting rid of the carried-interest loophole? Both the House and the Senate version — to be voted on as early as this coming week — merely tweak it, though Trump pledged on the campaign trail to kiss it goodbye.

That was back when he was demonizing Wall Street and the plutocrats gorging at its trough. Then he began filling positions in his administration.

For Treasury he picked Mnuchin, a former Goldman Sachs partner whose net worth, according to one authoritative estimate earlier this year, is $385 million. Another Goldman Sachs alumnus, Gary Cohn, became the director of the National Economic Council. His net worth is apparently north of $250 million.