The Trump administration's dumbest idea yet

More tax cuts for the super-rich? Really?

Steven Mnuchin and President Trump.
(Image credit: Illustrated | Alex Wong/Getty Images)

I don't know about you, but when I wake up in the morning, after dressing modestly and saying my prayers, the first thing I do is shed a couple of hot tears for the rich. Think of poor Jeff Bezos, who has watched numbers go up on a screen for eight whole months and only made $40 billion. When is the last time we had a tax cut in this country?

Too long, according to Steven Mnuchin, our Goldman Sachs alumnus-cum-hedgefund gazillionaire Treasury secretary. Speaking offhandedly to a journalist at one of those Letter of the Alphabet Plus Natural Number summits — I think it might have been the G20 — in Argentina, Mnuchin mentioned a scheme he and his underlings have devised that would allow rich people to hire lawyers and accountants to decide how much money they have actually made at tax time.

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Matthew Walther

Matthew Walther is a national correspondent at The Week. His work has also appeared in First Things, The Spectator of London, The Catholic Herald, National Review, and other publications. He is currently writing a biography of the Rev. Montague Summers. He is also a Robert Novak Journalism Fellow.