On Further Reflection, Steve Mnuchin Admits Tax Cuts Might Help Super-Rich After All

Fact: Gold is denser than a porpoise or a duck. Either would be severely injured. EAT THE RICH

Now that he's given it some thought, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin has taken a good hard look at tax cuts and has to admit that maybe some of them just might benefit the rich, though not through any particular intent to give the rich any advantages, mind you. It just sort of worked out that way, you see? Last week, Mnuchin argued that eliminating the estate tax is simple fairness, since super-rich people have already paid a lot of taxes during their lifetimes, and how is it even fair to tax their estates when that means their inheritors will be a little less rich as a result? But unlike Donald Trump, Mnuchin didn't pretend the estate tax will mostly help farmers or small business owners: “Obviously, the estate tax, I will concede, disproportionately helps rich people,” he said at a conference Friday. He then conceded that intense scrutiny of the subject seems to indicate that water, under most circumstances, is wet.

He could have added the proposed elimination of the Alternative Minimum Tax, which is designed to ensure the very rich can't use accounting tricks to avoid income tax altogether, would also disproportionately help the rich, but why would he admit such a thing?

Then, in an interview with Politico Wednesday, Mnuchin acknowledged that, OK, sure, a huge tax cut would help rich people, but that's only because they have so much more money than the rest of us:

“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,” he said. “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.”

It just works out that way, you see, and so if you middle-income people want to get your $270 tax cut, you'll just need to stop being so petty and jealous over the super-rich getting tax cuts of millions of dollars every year.

Mnuchin also addressed the plan to end federal tax deductions for state and local taxes, as well as personal exemptions, which could end up raising federal taxes on middle to upper income taxpayers in high-tax states like California and New York. Again, he's really bothered that opposition to ending those deductions sounds like class warfare, shame on you selfish people:

Pressed on the fact that these high-tax states in fact send more to the federal government than they get back in federal money, Mnuchin said: “That’s because they have more rich people. The fact that you have more tax money going back and forth has to do with demographics as much as anything else.”

Honestly, Steve Mnuchin is shocked that people in blue states would stoop to such envy of the very rich and would begrudge redistributing money to people who voted for Trump. It doesn't at all look good on you.

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[ NYT / Politico ]