One of the biggest obstacles facing Republicans’ tax-reform fever dream is convincing anyone that slashing taxes on the rich is really a gift to the middle class. Of course, dropping the pass-through rate to 25 percent, eliminating the estate tax, and lowering the corporate rate to 20 percent, as the G.O.P.’s chief tax-plan team has proposed, wouldn’t do much for ordinary Americans at all, while delivering all kinds of burnt-sienna giveaways to the wealthy. To compound the problem, people like Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn haven’t been doing a great job of selling the plan, with the former saying in an interview with Politico that it’s nearly impossible not to cut taxes on the wealthy and the latter admitting on TV that he couldn’t guarantee some members of the middle class wouldn’t ultimately pay more in taxes.

Clearly irked by these amateurs, House Speaker Paul Ryan, who has many more years of experience deceiving the public, told CBS News on Friday that the G.O.P.’s tax plan “is about the people, about half of which are living paycheck to paycheck, and giving them a break on their taxes.” Other House Republicans also apparently have a strategy to help sell the People’s Tax Plan: painting a thin veneer of populism over what remains a massive gift to the donor class.

Axios reports that Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee are “currently exploring not cutting the income-tax rate for people who earn $1 million or more per year.” Obviously, that would make for a great headline if you’re trying to convince people that your plan is all about the common man, until you dig down just one inch below the layer of G.O.P. spin. Currently, the marginal tax rate for people making $418,000 or more a year is 39.6 percent; under the plan released in September, everyone making more than $418,000 would pay 35 percent. But now, Republicans are thinking it would sound great if they could say that anyone earning over $1 million would not enjoy that cut. So, they’re considering just bumping people who earn between $418,000 and $999,999 a year into a lower tax bracket.

As New York’s Ed Kilgore points out, this appears to be expressly designed to rob Democrats of the talking point that the G.O.P.’s plan is designed to reduce taxes on millionaires (and billionaires) by making cuts to federal programs that overwhelmingly help the poor. What the G.O.P. won’t mention as it trumpets its phony class war is that “even if the top rate remains unchanged, millionaires will still get a tax cut on their first $1 million in earnings; only income above that level would still be taxed at the top rate.” And, as we noted on Friday, all of the really big benefits to the wealthy—the elimination of the estate tax, the slashing of the pass-through and corporate rates—are still all there. But the odds of Team Trump or Paul Ryan bringing that up are about as good as the odds Trump will tell a Gold Star father he‘ll send him $25,000 and follow through without being publicly shamed first.

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Ivanka tries to sell tax plan as pro-family

Elsewhere in the tax-reform bait-and-switch, First Daughter and presidential adviser Ivanka Trump, who in August blessed the administration’s decision to abandon an Obama-era rule aimed at closing the gender pay gap, traveled to Bucks County, Pennsylvania, to pitch her father’s tax plan as a positive move for working middle-class families. “For me, this tax plan really couples together two things that are really core values as a country, which is working and supporting the American family,” she said at a town hall on Monday, adding that the proposal to slash the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 20 percent would allow companies to spur growth that would ultimately help families, despite the fact that studies suggest otherwise. Trump also focused on the proposal to expand the $1,000 child-care tax credit (the details of which have yet to be worked out), saying, “Every parent has to manage the competing demands of raising a family and their passions . . . I too had to manage that, but I'm far more fortunate than most and I had help,” which might be the understatement of both this century and last.