Yesterday, Louise Linton, wife of U.S. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, posted this gem on Instagram.
It appears that Linton went on a #daytrip to #Kentucky! While there, she and her husband saw the #nicest #people in the #beautiful #countryside. Most importantly, she hailed the designers of her apparel; #rolandmouret pants—bargain alert! Retails for only $925! (In fact, by my math, you can get everything she is wearing in the picture for only about $6,000!)
Her final flourish: #USA!
Descending the stairs behind her, Mnuchin is also in the picture getting off what looks like Air Force 2 or 3 or some other cabinet-level government plane.
Many on social media reacted in disgust at the government-financed #daytrip. One woman wrote, "Glad we could pay for your little getaway. #deplorable.”
Linton went a bit aggro in a rebuke (since taken down) filled with wisdom and “hunanity.”
That’s a lot to unwrap, but let’s try.
First, put aside that her husband, the “foreclosure king,” made his fortune by profiting from foreclosures and other people's misery after the 2008 recession. Put aside that her great gift to the economy has been bragging about attending a for-profit, unaccredited law school and self-publishing a book on Zambia that contained so many falsehoods she had to completely recant an entire memoir.
What Linton doesn’t mention, is that the reason for the #daytrip to Kentucky was to sell a tax cut plan that will mostly benefit people that wear one thousand dollar pants, and mostly hurt people that spend one thousand dollars for a whole year's worth of clothes. And what better place to do that than in Kentucky—one of our nation's poorest states. And what better posterchildren for the Rich That Already Don't Pay Their Fair Share than Mnuchin and Linton.
Let’s run the numbers: If the tax plan Trump touted in last year's campaign is passed, the median house income in Kentucky ($42,958), with two children and $5,000 in itemized deductions and $2,000 in child care costs, will see their taxes increase by $551 dollars, according to the right-leaning Tax Foundation's Tax Calculator.
Meanwhile, consider the fate of a wealthy couple, Mnuchin and his wife, for example, who let's conservatively estimate make at least 1,000 times the median Kentucky family or $42.9 million a year. Under the new Trump tax plan, they would be looking at about a $2.8 million dollar tax cut.
Now, thanks to Linton’s post, we know the thinking behind this plan! They need a tax cut because they already pay tons of taxes—like more in a day than you probably make in a year! And they deserve to hold to more of their money. And you and the other peons don't.
She makes a valid point: The wealthy do indeed pay a great deal more in income taxes than the rest of us. But, as Bernie Sanders often says, the top 1/10 of the top one percent now own about as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent. And the corollary to that is, if you're making armloads of money and everyone else isn't, you're one of the few that actually has enough income to tax.
Plus, it’s not like the effective tax rate has been keeping pace with the larger and larger share of the wealth pie they’ve been eating each year. In fact, the effective income tax rate for the super wealthy like Mnuchin and Linton is only about 23 percent these days, which is actually three percent less than it was in 1992, the last year of the vaunted low-tax Reagan-Bush era.
Geez, talk about being “adorably out of touch.”
Jud Lounsbury is a political writer based in Madison, Wisconsin.