If you’re pitching a tax plan as a yuge gift to the middle class, and not at all helpful to the nation’s top-earners, it’s not great for your case when people who analyze these things for a living conclude that, actually, your plan is hugely beneficial to the top 1 percent and of little help—and possible detriment—to just about everyone else. The Trump administration and the G.O.P., in all of their collective wisdom, apparently did not see this coming when they unveiled the framework of their regressive tax-reform plan last Wednesday. Now, in the wake of deafening criticism that the proposal will be a giant, papaya-colored giveaway to a group of people who most Americans think should be taxed more, Trump officials have been forced to explain why they’ve decided that millionaires and billionaires such as themselves need a much bigger tax break—an effort that has centered on claiming that anyone telling you such things couldn’t possibly have any idea what they’re talking about.

When asked about a new analysis by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center that the top 1 percent of earners would enjoy almost 80 percent of the benefits of the plan, White House Budget Director Mick Mulvaney claimed, falsely, that Joe Biden’s former economic adviser works for the organization and therefore its analysis cannot be trusted. (The former adviser, Jared Bernstein, worked at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.) “It‘s not surprising that, you know a former chief economic for a Democrat vice president doesn’t like a Republican plan,” Mulvaney told Fox News’s Chris Wallace. Elsewhere, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and National Economic Council director Gary Cohn, who last week couldn’t guarantee middle-class families won’t pay more in taxes, argued along with House Speaker Paul Ryan that because their plan is missing so many key details, it’s not possible to say that it’s the wealthy who will benefit the most.

But the contours of the plan, such as they are, are relatively clear-cut. As New York’s Jonathan Chait points out, while the Tax Policy Center notes that “Many aspects of the plan were unspecified or left to be determined by the tax writing committees in Congress,” the group’s “preliminary analysis” was fleshed out by previous proposals such as “the House Republican leadership’s ‘A Better Way’ blueprint,” elements of which House Republicans will presumably incorporate into the final bill. “If House Republicans change the contours of their proposal,” Chait writes, “then the Tax Policy Center will publish a new analysis reflecting the changes.” It’s not that complicated, unless you have a vested interest in making it so in order to obscure the fact that you’re trying to push through a plan that is almost exclusively beneficial to people like Donald Trump.

“I don’t know how the Tax Policy Center can publish those figures, since they don’t have all the details,“ Mnuchin told George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s This Week. Later in the interview, when asked if the president will “veto a bill if it comes back to him, with middle class tax increases for some Americans,” the Treasury secretary refused to give a definitive answer, saying “The president isn’t setting up any criteria up front as to what he’s going to veto and what he’s not going to veto.”

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