Earlier this week, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin took one of the final steps on a long road to admitting that under Trump’s tax plan, the wealthy can expect to benefit bigly. Following Mnuchin’s transition-period promise that “there will be no tax cut for the upper class,” his equivocation in May that the objective was to make a middle-income tax cut but that he couldn’t promise anything, and his September clarification that that thing he said back in November “was never a promise . . . never a pledge,” in an interview with Politico published on Friday, the secretary told reporter Ben White,“it’s very hard not to give tax cuts to the wealthy . . . the math . . . is just hard to do.”

According to House Speaker Paul Ryan, however, the 1 percent shouldn’t get too excited. “This [tax plan] is about the people, about half of which are living paycheck to paycheck, and giving them a break on their taxes,” Ryan said Friday on CBS This Morning. He claimed that the bill, which is expected to be finalized in “a number of days,” will include an additional fourth income-tax bracket beyond the three called for in the framework released by the Big Six. Ryan said it hasn’t yet been determined whether the fourth bracket would stay at the current rate of 39.6 percent. He also said he disagreed with National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn’s admission that he could not guarantee some members of the middle class wouldn't pay more in taxes.

For any ultra-wealthy people breathing into a paper bag right now, take heart in Ryan’s careful word choice that top earners “do not see a big rate cut,” which 1) seems to leave the door open for some kind of rate cut, and 2) says nothing about touching the other benefits of the plan that overwhelmingly benefit the rich, like eliminating the estate tax, dropping the pass-through rate to 25 percent, and slashing the corporate tax rate to 20 percent. Despite the White House and G.O.P.‘s claims that it's all about helping workers, those little details are expected to do a hell of a lot more for “those at the top.”

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Speaking of tax cuts...

On Friday, the Treasury Department announced that the federal government ended its 2017 fiscal year with a budget deficit of $666 billion, up $80 billion from the previous year, and the sixth highest in history. Also on Friday, the Senate paved the way to use reconciliation to pass a tax plan that would add $1.5 trillion to the deficit over the next decade, although if you ask the Trump administration, there’s nothing to worry about because its massive tax cuts will pay for themselves through economic growth (a claim even an official who served under George W. Bush says is bull sh*t).

The Mooch is on the warpath

In the wake of the Scaramucci Post’s decision to run it‘s now infamous Holocaust poll, the New York Post reported that the financier-turned-10-day White House employee lost a speaking engagement at investment firm Neuberger Berman. That didn’t sit will with the Mooch, whose spokesman said in a statement that the speech “was an unpaid favor for a friend” and that “no future speaking opportunities” were at risk. But Scaramucci wasn’t content to simply let his flack do the talking.