Back in November, then Treasury Secretary nominee Steve Mnuchin appeared on CNBC and made a bold statement: under Donald Trump’s tax plan, “there will be no absolute tax cut for the upper class.” Then in May, he began the slow-but-steady process of walking back his transition-period claim, saying that while the president’s objective was to “make a middle-income tax cut,” he could not actually promise that this would occur, “since the results will be a combined effort of the administration and the House and Senate.”

Four months later, after the Big Six unveiled a tax plan that would bring the top tax rate down to 35 percent; eliminate the inheritance tax (which only affects estates worth more than $5.5 million for an individual and $11 million for a couple); slash the corporate tax rate to 20 percent, the savings from which studies show would largely go to “those at the top”; and drop the rate on “pass-through companies” to 25 percent; Mnuchin told CNN that the claim he made during his congressional hearing “was never a promise . . . never a pledge.”

Like many things that come out of the Trump administration, though, Mnuchin’s comments were apparently never meant to be taken literally or seriously—a point he drove home during an interview with Politico published Wednesday, in which the foreclosure tycoon-turned-Cabinet official came oh-so close to finally dropping an act no one bought in the first place. Claiming that it was basically impossible not to cut taxes for the wealthy, Mnuchin explained to reporter Ben White, “The top 20 percent of the people pay 95 percent of the taxes. The top 10 percent of the people pay 81 percent of the taxes. So when you’re cutting taxes across the board, it’s very hard not to give tax cuts to the wealthy with tax cuts to the middle class. The math, given how much you are collecting, is just hard to do.”

Left out of Mnuchin’s analysis was the fact that Team Trump doesn’t actually have to cut taxes across the board, but apparently that concept is so inconceivable that it has never crossed the Treasury secretary’s mind. He also seems to have overlooked the fact that the Trump administration doesn’t need to eliminate the estate tax, which Mnuchin and National Economic Council directory Gary Cohn previously claimed was all about helping “American farmers,” and which Mnuchin admitted last Friday “obviously . . . disproportionately helps rich people.” Stay tuned for next week, when Mnuchin will presumably tell reporters, “Our tax plan is expressly designed to help families who can only afford one yacht finally buy that second one.”

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Mnuchin: Cut taxes or the market will crash

Elsewhere in Mnuchin’s interview with Politico, the Treasury secretary threatened congress about what might happen if it fails to get a tax bill passed. “There is no question that the rally in the stock market has baked into it reasonably high expectations of us getting tax cuts and tax reform done,” Mnuchin said. “To the extent we get the tax deal done, the stock market will go up higher. But there’s no question in my mind that if we don’t get it done you’re going to see a reversal of a significant amount of these gains.”

On the other hand . . .

Chiming in for the adult contingent in the room, Fed officials have repeated their warnings that the current tax proposal could ultimately be harmful to the economy. At an event on Wednesday, William Dudley of the New York Fed and Robert Kaplan of the Dallas Fed said that legislation that prioritizes deficit-funded tax cuts over reforming the tax code to make it more efficient could “lead to long-term pain.” “If it’s a short-term stimulus, or basically a tax cut funded by growth in the deficit, I actually think that could be harmful,” Kaplan said. “We are either at full employment or are nearing full employment, and my concern is that if we do a tax cut financed by increasing the debt, the deficit, we’ll get the short-term up and then come right back down to trend growth, and when it’s over, we’ll be more highly leveraged than we were before.” While Dudley denied fellow panelist Steve Rattner’s conclusion that “what I think I heard both of you guys say is that you don’t like the president’s proposal,” Kaplan responded “We didn’t say that, but you can draw that conclusion.”