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This week, House and Senate Republicans will be working on a final budget plan. They are operating from templates that call for cuts of about 40 percent on average by 2025 in programs for low and moderate income households — things like food assistance, college aid and tax credits for the working poor.

The damage would be severe. For starters, sixteen million people would be pushed into poverty, or deeper into poverty, after 2017.

At the same time, the Republican plans leave untouched nearly $1 trillion worth of annual tax breaks that overwhelmingly benefit the top 20 percent of households.

If that’s not flabbergasting enough, there’s this:

Separate from the budget plans, nearly all House Republicans and seven Democrats passed a bill last week to repeal the federal estate tax on inherited wealth. Repeal would benefit the 5,500 wealthiest families in America each year and would do nothing for everyone else, because the estate tax applies only to those at the very top of the wealth ladder. For estates valued at $50 million and up, for example, repeal would save the heirs about $20 million per estate, on average, in 2016.

Given the political divide in Washington, neither the Republican budget cuts nor the estate-tax repeal are likely to become law anytime soon, if ever. But that only makes them all the more revealing of Republican intent. They are being advanced mainly as a way of saying, “This is who we are, even if we can’t win in the moment.”

That political message, however, is divorced from coherent policy. Take the central issue of inequality. Republicans like to say that the problem is disparity of opportunity, not disparity of wealth. But the two are increasingly one and the same, with federal budgets and inheritances playing a major role in both.

The Republican budget plans, for instance, obviously tilt the economic playing field in favor of the wealthy by cutting tax credits for the poor while leaving intact tax breaks for the wealthy.

The role of untaxed inheritances would also be stark. The top 0.1 percent of families — the main beneficiaries of estate tax repeal — possessed 22 percent of the nation’s wealth as of 2012, the most recent data available. The top 1 percent controlled 42 percent. Such concentrations of wealth — unseen since the Roaring Twenties — are an anchor on the upward mobility of everyone else, because as wealth becomes more concentrated, a big inheritance becomes ever more important to one’s future prospects.

So if lawmakers — Republicans and Democrats — were concerned about opportunity, they would increase federal spending and increase the estate tax. Any efforts to the contrary are simply nonsense.