Republicans, of course, insist that this is really about protecting family farms and small businesses from Uncle Sam's allegedly rapacious grasp, but some facts are in order. According to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, only 30 such farms and businesses owed any estate tax in 2015, and they only paid 0.05 percent of the estate tax's total revenue. The reality is that you have to be pretty rich to leave behind more than a $10.9 million estate, which is how much a married couple can give their kids tax-free. And you have to be super rich for the 40 percent tax on anything over that to be a big deal to you. Indeed, the top 1 percent paid $13.8 billion of the $18.4 billion that the estate tax raised in 2015. That's 75 percent of the total. And the top 0.1 percent alone paid $6.4 billion, or 35 percent.

Not only would getting rid of the estate tax be a giveaway to the über-wealthy, but it'd also be a giveaway that probably wouldn't create that many jobs. That's because the usual story about why tax cuts for the rich are good for the rest of us — that they'll save and invest more, and, in the process, make the entire economy more productive — doesn't apply as much when it comes to the estate tax. Would Donald Trump really set more money aside if Donald Trump Jr. got to keep more of his inheritance? Or would he set less aside? If anything, the estate tax might make Trump père save and invest more to make sure his kids got the same-sized patrimony they would if there wasn't one.

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And again, we're talking about real money here. The Tax Policy Center estimates that the estate tax would raise $225 billion over the next decade. That'd be enough to pay for the Children's Health Insurance Program three times over.

The point is that there probably won't be any losers in the battle for the Trump administration's soul. Well, at least not among Republicans. Populists will get their tax breaks for companies that build infrastructure, conservatives will get their tax breaks for Donald Trump's kids, and Donald Trump himself will get his tax breaks for high-profile companies that reverse their plans to ship jobs overseas so that he can claim his negotiating prowess is saving the American Dream. Which is to say that principled objections to picking winners and losers will disappear once it's clear that picking winners really means giving some rich people another tax cut. What could be wrong with that? Think of it as the Oprah theory of tax cuts — you get a tax cut and you get a tax cut and you get a tax cut — if, that is, you own a company or stand to inherit one. If you don't, well, you might have heard about this red hat. But in any case, deficits will go back to not mattering for at least the next four years.

It will be populism of, by and for plutocrats.