Today’s Boring Policy Number: 16%

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Remember all that stuff about how Donald Trump’s tax plan treats pass-through income? (Quick refresher here if you don’t.) Apparently the Tax Foundation gave up on getting a straight answer about how this works, so they’re now giving two estimates of the impact of Trump’s plan. If we assume he’s going to keep the low pass-through rate—the one that would benefit his own businesses—they figure his plan would create a whopping 215,000 new jobs per year over the next decade. And that’s with lots of dynamic scoring pixie dust sprinkled around.

In other words, I think we can safely say that Trump’s plan would create approximately zero jobs. However it would blow a huge hole in the deficit (about $6 trillion without pixie dust) and it would be a huge windfall for the rich, increasing their after-tax income by a whopping 16 percent. And make no mistake: unlike a lot of Donald Trump’s fanciful ideas, a Republican Congress would be delighted to pass something like this. And they’d do it in a way that couldn’t be stopped by a filibuster.

Once again, I get it. This is BORING. It’s policy stuff. Ugh. We really don’t want a bunch of dull numbers like this mucking up our beautiful front pages or our lovingly hand-crafted nightly news programs. That’s why I kept this post short.

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PLEASE—BEFORE YOU CLICK AWAY!

“Lying.” “Disgusting.” “Scum.” “Slime.” “Corrupt.” “Enemy of the people.” Donald Trump has always made clear what he thinks of journalists. And it’s plain now that his administration intends to do everything it can to stop journalists from reporting things it doesn’t like—which is most things that are true.

We’ll say it loud and clear: At Mother Jones, no one gets to tell us what to publish or not publish, because no one owns our fiercely independent newsroom. But that also means we need to directly raise the resources it takes to keep our journalism alive. There’s only one way for that to happen, and it’s readers like you stepping up. Please do your part and help us reach our $150,000 membership goal by May 31.

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