On Monday, Donald Trump momentarily took some time away from live-blogging his feelings about football players (“total disrespect”) and North Korea (“they won't be around much longer”) to update his followers on the very serious, very presidential work that would unfortunately take away from his beloved Twitter time. “Important meetings taking place today,” he said. “Big tax cuts & reform.”

While the “Big Six” working on tax reform have yet to release an actual plan, leaked details have suggested that the proposal would “dramatically cut taxes for corporations and the wealthy, provide a measure of middle-class tax relief, and punish some households in Democratic-leaning states like New York and New Jersey.“ For the former Miss Universe owner, who still manages to work Hillary Clinton’s e-mails into conversation 10 months after the election, it doesn’t get much better than that. Per CNBC:

The popular provision [that allows you to deduct from your reported income the money you pay in state and local taxes on income, real estate or sales of big-ticket items] may be on the tax reform chopping block for a simple reason: eliminating it would generate tens of billions of dollars in revenue needed to offset the money lost from lowering tax rates on individuals and corporations. [. . .]

One thing is clear: eliminating the deduction would hurt taxpayers who voted for Hillary Clinton a lot harder than it would those who voted for Donald Trump, according to a CNBC analysis of voter and tax data. The disparity is striking at the state level, where the bulk of the benefit for deducting state and local taxes goes to taxpayers in states with higher-than-average taxes and median incomes that are bigger than the national median. Taxpayers in California and New York, among the bluest states in the country, would be the hardest hit. Of the total deductions claimed nationwide, half of the benefit in 2014 went to just seven states—California, New York, New Jersey, Illinois, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Maryland, according to a report from the Tax Foundation.

As for his plan being all about helping the lower and middle class, which Trump emphasized on Sunday when telling reporters “We think we’re going to bring the individual rate to 10 percent or 12 percent, much lower than it is now,” you may be surprised to hear that’s not totally accurate! As Bloomberg points out, for 2017 the lowest income tax bracket is, wait for it, 10 percent. (For incomes between $9,325 and $37,950, the rate is 15 percent.)

As for corporations and the wealthy, Sahil Kapur reports that three tax lobbyists familiar with the emerging framework of the plan say that the corporate tax rate would drop from 35 percent to 20 percent, and the top individual tax rate would fall from 39.6 percent to 35 percent, with a 25 percent “pass-through” rate for certain business owners like hedge-fund managers and owners of a company called the Trump Organization. Those changes, the Tax Foundation’s Kyle Pomerleau told Bloomberg, “would cut taxes substantially for the top 1 percent of earners.”

But wait, you say. Didn’t Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin claim in November that there would be no “absolute tax cut” for the wealthy on Donald Trump’s watch? And the answer is yes, he did, and lawmakers even went so far as to refer to the statement as the “Mnuchin rule” during congressional hearings, but you weren’t supposed to take him literally or seriously. He was just letting words tumble out of his mouth and he can’t help it if you took them to heart. "It was was never a promise. It was never a pledge," Mnuchin said on CNN on Sunday.

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Treasury secretary thinks football players don’t have a right to free speech on the field

As you may have heard, over the weekend the president of the United States of America got into a long and drawn out out fight with . . . the National Football League. After initially tweeting that basketball player Stephen Curry was disinvited from the White House on account of “hesitating” in his decision to attend a ceremony with his fellow players, Trump proceeded to go on a multi-day tirade about all the terrible football players kneeling during the national anthem, and the team owners and commissioner for allowing them to do so. At one point, he used the phrase “So proud of NASCAR,” perhaps thinking the odds of a protester among its ranks was low, only for Dale Earnhardt Jr. to defend the right to protest. Luckily, one person he can always count on to back him up was making the rounds on the Sunday talk shows and just like he did in the wake of the Charlottesville controversy, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin defended his boss’s deranged weekend rants.

“The NFL has all different types of rules,” Mnuchin told Martha Raddatz on ABC’s This Week. “You can’t have stickers on your helmet; you have to have your jersey tucked in. I think what the president is saying is that the owners should have a rule that players should have to stand in respect for the national anthem. . . . This is a job. And the employers have the right, when the players are working, to have rules. So, you know, why didn’t they wear stickers? Why didn’t the Dallas Cowboys, why were they allowed to wear stickers in response to people they wanted to pay respect to? So, the NFL is picking and choosing what they want to enforce.” Mnuchin, who apparently spends about as much time studying the constitution as he does flying commercial, added that the players “Have the right to have the First Amendment off the field.”

Congress is corrupt, part one million

In 2012, a hilariously named bill called the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act was signed into law. What does the STOCK Act do? It bars members of Congress from trading on material non-public information in an attempt to combat insider trading by lawmakers. What the STOCK Act didn’t do was hold members of the House and Senate to the same conflict-of-interest laws that employees of the executive branch are beholden to, which bars them from holding investments that might pose conflicts of interest with their work and requires them to recuse themselves from any decision-making process that might conflict with their remaining investments. That’s how people like Congressman turned Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price have been able to get away with things like reportedly “trading more than $300,000 in shares of health-related companies . . . while sponsoring and advocating legislation that potentially could affect those companies’ stocks.” It‘s also how, according to a new report by Politico, Congressional aides have been able to make a cottage industry of trading on stocks that constitute comically, flagrant conflicts of interest with their work on Capitol Hill.

A Politico review of federal disclosures for 2015 and 2016 found that some senior aides regularly buy and sell individual stocks that present potential conflicts of interest with their work. A smaller number of staffers trade in companies that lobby Congress and the committees that employ them. In all, approximately 450 aides have bought or sold a stock of more than $1,001 in value since May 2015.

That’s likely just the tip of the iceberg, since most congressional aides aren’t required to report their trades. Only those in positions earning more than $124,406 per year must reveal their investments. Of the 12,500 staffers working for lawmakers, committees and leadership offices, only about 1,700 make that much, according to data compiled by Legistorm and the Brookings Institution.

Government watchdogs say that, at a minimum, staffers should be prevented from buying shares of companies with business before their committees. But they are not. And despite the disparity between the rigorous standards for the executive branch and the laxness of Congress, the House and Senate have taken a permissive approach even to enforcing existing rules.

That’s a serious problem, watchdogs say, because aides often have more of a hands-on role than the members themselves in crafting details of legislation that could have enormous consequences for individual companies. And because aides are rarely in the spotlight, there’s more potential for ethical lapses to go unnoticed.

“The staff level is actually more dangerous, because they don’t get scrutiny and they’re not accountable,” Issue One’s Meredith McGehee said. “If a member does it, he can get defeated. A staff person can wield enormous amounts of power that isn’t seen, and there’s really no way to hold that staff accountable.”

Steve Cohen stops pretending he hasn’t been planning his comeback down to the second since 2014

Finally, the props guy can put the finishing touches on the apparatus the multi-billionaire will use to lower himself from the rafters of the New York Stock Exchange and descend onto the floor to ring the bell on the his ban expires. Per Business Insider:

Cohen, the billionaire hedge-fund manager briefly banned from the industry after an insider-trading investigation, this week sent investors documents pitching his new fund, Stamford Harbor Capital, a person who has reviewed the deck told Business Insider. The pitch is the latest move cementing the controversial billionaire's return to managing money. . . . Until now, though, investors, advisors, and others in the hedge-fund industry said Cohen's representatives had limited themselves to vague and almost bizarrely hypothetical conversations about the fund along the lines of: If a particular person named Steve Cohen happens to launch a fund, and that fund happens to open next year, what would it take for an investor to sign on? “It was a lot of wink wink, nudge nudge,” said one person, who spoke of meetings before the documents were sent this week.

Elsewhere!

Tom Price Blames Liberals for Blowing His $400,000 Jet Habit Out of Proportion (The Hive)

A $2,700 Donation by a BlackRock Executive Could Cost the Firm $37 Million (Reuters)

How Jared Kushner Is Dismantling a Family Empire (The Hive)

S.E.C. Enforcement Probe Led to Renewed Look at 2016 Hack (W.S.J)

Economists at the Fed Are Worried About Its Ability to Respond to Future Crises (CNBC)

Eminem Royalties Shares to Be Sold in I.P.O. (Financial Times)

The Rich Are Getting Richer in the U.S. Recovery (Bloomberg)

Here’s How Tax Reform Could Squeeze the Middle Class (Bloomberg)

Deloitte Hit by Cyber Attack (Financial Times)

How the Polar Ice Caps Became the Ultimate, Limited-Edition Luxury Destination (Vanities)