Cutting taxes on the rich is a uniquely unpopular idea. Since 1939, Gallup has been asking, “Do you think our government should or should not redistribute wealth by heavy taxes on the rich”? In 1939, 54 percent said “should not” and only 35 percent said “should,” even though the Great Depression was raging and the New Deal was well along. Since 1939, though, the should nots have been falling and the shoulds have been rising. Today, a 52 percent majority say the government should redistribute wealth by taxing the rich heavily, and a 47 percent minority say it should not. (The current vogue for democratic socialism isn’t happening in a vacuum.)

If you put the question in a manner more appetizing to moderates—do the rich pay their fair share?—61 percent say no, according to an April Pew Research Center poll. Fully 81 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaners also say no, along with a not-inconsiderable 41 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaners.

Given these realities, the White House, if it endorses a tax cut, will try to sell it as a middle-class tax cut. The Democrats have tax-cut proposals of their own that target lower-income people. I’ve explained previously that I prefer the alternative approach of cutting payroll taxes at the low end and eliminating the Social Security tax ceiling at the high end. But earlier this month my New Republic colleague Monica Potts made a convincing case that the Democrats’ tax-cut gambit has run its course. So maybe the priority ought to be protecting what revenues we have left and reducing the deficit wherever possible so the bond market doesn’t rage out of control. No tax cut will help with that.

On Tuesday, National Economic Council director Kevin Hassett and Larry Kudlow, who held that post during Trump’s first term, discussed on Fox Business the two tax proposals Trump is contemplating. One is to index the capital gains tax, and the other is to exempt from capital gains tax home sales below $2 million. (Currently the exemption goes up to $500,000.) The first of these is a more obvious giveaway to the rich. The second mimics the Obama administration’s strategy of shielding the haute bourgeoisie when it hikes taxes on the rich. Biden tried a version of this and failed, producing no major tax increase on the rich, because his Democratic congressional majority was too timid to impose one. In Trump’s version, the context for cutting taxes for the haute bourgeoisie is a tax cut for richer folks, too.

The dialog between Kudlow and Hassett conveyed that particular air of unreality characteristic of Fox World. (It was on Kudlow’s Fox Business show, which is called Kudlow.) Kudlow began by noting that the Congressional Budget Office had just projected this year’s budget deficit to be $2.1 trillion, up from February’s estimate of $1.9 trillion. “The budget deficit for the first ten months of the year is $1.8 trillion,” Kudlow said. “I’m not sure I understand why.”

Kudlow was baffled because he actually believes, contrary to 45 years’ evidence, the GOP’s propaganda that tax cuts pay for themselves. They do not. The tax cuts in last year’s budget reconciliation bill, for instance, slashed federal revenue by an estimated $570 billion. In addition, the Supreme Court made Trump give back about $166 billion in tariff revenue, of which Trump’s already rebated about $100 billion. According to The Wall Street Journal’s Theo Francis and Celia Bernhardt, these rebates have been so big that they’re juicing the stock market.

Anybody who follows the business news should know all this.

Kudlow asked Hassett to explain this mystery of a persistently high deficit. Hassett explained the bit about tariff rebates. He also complained that the CBO isn’t factoring in the Trump administration’s reduction of the civil service workforce by 300,000. The real figure is 155,000, according to an April report by the nonprofit Partnership for Public Service. If we assume, very generously, that Trump’s unloaded another 45,000 civil servants since April, then Hassett’s estimate is still off by one-third. The budget-hawk nonprofit Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget says that a 10 percent reduction in federal employment will save $350 billion over 10 years. The Partnership for Public Service says that Trump cut 12 percent. Let’s once again be generous and call the federal workforce cut 15 percent. That’s $525 billion over 10 years, or $53 billion per year—peanuts compared to the cost of Trump’s tax cut, which Hassett didn’t mention, or the cost of Trump’s tariff rebates, which he did.

In Fox World, as opposed to the real world, it is not thought illogical to follow a lamentation about government insolvency with a plea for tax cuts. Kudlow cited a McLaughlin & Associates poll that said 62 percent of voters approved of indexing the capital gains tax to inflation. The idea, which Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, has pushed in Congress, possesses obvious appeal; why should you pay taxes on inflation? Income taxes are already indexed to avoid “bracket creep,” which is when inflation pushes you into a higher marginal-tax bracket. Why not index capital gains taxes, too?

Because capital gains are already taxed at a lower rate than labor income. The top capital gains rate is 20 percent. The top labor-income rate (which is also too low) is 37 percent. Get back to me when you’ve eliminated that differential—and when you’ve also eliminated the “angel of death” loophole that lets assets escape capital gains tax when passed on to heirs—and we can talk. But if we ever do index capital gains like we do income-tax brackets, we’ll have to figure out some way to capture lost revenue—because remember that $2.1 trillion deficit? You don’t want to make it $3 trillion. According to the Yale Budget Lab, indexing capital gains would cost $170 billion over 10 years if it applied only to assets purchased after 2025, and almost $1 trillion if it applied to all assets.

Then there’s the distributional impact. People making less than about $100,000 would receive virtually no benefit, according to the Yale model (and would likely pay more income tax to cover the lost revenue). People making more than about $3 million, on the other hand, would save $350,000 in taxes. If McLaughlin & Associates had bothered to furnish voters with that information, its poll results would have been quite different.

Kudlow also said participants in the McLaughlin & Associates poll “probably want a break on the capital gains tax for the sale of a home, maybe up to $2 million.” The poll did indeed show that 52 percent of voters wanted to increase the capital gains exemption on home sales from the current $500,000 to $1 million. But the poll made no mention of exempting home sales all the way up to $2 million, which would affect a small minority of all home sales. Bloomberg’s O’Donnell and Reilly pointed out that according to the National Association of Realtors, only the richest 15 percent of homeowners—a group already wealthier than the general population—would benefit from bumping the exemption up to $2 million. The other 85 percent avoid capital gains tax already through the very generous $500,000 exemption.

Hassett expressed interest in these two policy proposals but didn’t commit Trump to them. Kudlow, however, said he’d spoken to Trump already. “He liked the idea of the indexing, he liked the idea of a bigger exemption,” Kudlow said.

If Trump endorses these tax proposals, he’ll say they’re an affordability play and argue that lowering capital gains tax will encourage more people to sell their houses, thereby lowering prices. But Democrats should answer that these are just two more Trump giveaways to the wealthy, most especially the indexing of capital gains. There are many ways to reduce the cost of housing: zoning for higher density where appropriate; investing in infrastructure; eliminating tariffs on lumber, steel, and aluminum to lower construction costs; subsidizing low-income housing; and so on. Throwing money at millionaires and billionaires is the most regressive way conceivable to lower housing costs, and there’s no great reason to believe it would even work.