I'm not sure Mnuchin has really thought that last part through. The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, after all, estimates that 9.3 percent of the top 1 percent would face a tax increase next year under the just-passed Republican plan ... but so would 7.3 percent of households between the 40th and 80th income percentiles. If this is enough to say the Trump tax cuts aren't good for the rich, doesn't that mean they aren't good for the middle class either?

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That's not really a fair question, though. It's using things called “facts” and “evidence” when these Republicans don't seem to be interested in either of those. Indeed, they spent years insisting that our official budget scorekeepers needed to start looking at how much tax cuts pay for themselves, only to dismiss those numbers when it turned out that the answer wasn't very much. Mnuchin then took it even further by putting out a one-page paper that, in effect, said their tax cuts really would pay for themselves if you assumed that they paid for themselves. This is apparently what he said they'd been “working around the clock” on.

This is some particularly aggressive nonsense. Sure, Republicans have spent the last 40 years making grandiose claims about the efficacy of deficit-financed tax cuts for the rich: They slice, they dice, they make the economy grow so much that the benefits trickle all the way down to the lowest rentier, and, maybe, even to some workers too! But they have tended to be at least a little less brazen (although sometimes only that) about saying tax cuts would completely pay for themselves. Nor have they ever had the chutzpah to say that tax cuts for the rich are not, in fact, for, well, the rich. They've preferred to elide the issue entirely and talk about the smaller tax cuts they were giving to working people instead. Or, in George W. Bush's case, to brag about the fact that people who didn't pay federal income tax before still wouldn't!

But make no mistake: The Trump tax cuts are for the rich. It's not just that its middle-class tax breaks are set to expire in 2026 to help pay for its permanent ones for corporations. It's that even before that happens, the Tax Policy Center thinks that most middle-class households would only get a 1 percent to 2 percent bump in their after-tax incomes, while the top 5 percent of Americans would see a 3 percent to 4 percent one. That's what happens when you cut the top tax rate to 37 percent as a “compromise” between having it at 38.5 or 39.6 percent (no really, they did that). Or keep the carried interested loophole for private equity managers that Trump likes to pretend to hate, or add in a last-minute tax cut specifically for real estate companies like the Trump Organization. Not to mention the corporate tax cut that's the centerpiece of this all, which, by chief executives' own admission, would mostly go toward bigger dividends and more share buybacks.

Giving the top 1 percent the biggest tax cut of all at a time of already record-high inequality is pretty hard to justify, so Republicans aren't even trying. They're just saying they aren't. “This is going to cost me a fortune,” Trump claimed a few weeks ago.