When Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin claimed that more than 100 people in his department were “working around the clock” on forthcoming analysis regarding the G.O.P.’s tax plan, those he credited with “running scenarios” on the bills were surprised, given that such analysis did not, in fact exist. Their time had been spent, they told The New York Times, running models on “individual provisions or policy ideas”—a far cry from the detailed, thorough analysis that Mnuchin had repeatedly promised was right around the corner, and would definitively prove that the cuts paid for themselves. With the clock running down and the Inspector General digging into the mysterious case of the missing Treasury analysis, the former Goldman partner turned foreclosure mogul pulled through on Monday with a report clocking in at a single page and fewer than 500 words that says the Senate plan will totally pay for itself—assuming a set of circumstances that are about as likely as Jared Kushner bringing peace to the Middle East.

For real-live economists and tax experts, Mnuchin’s “analysis” is an infuriating disgrace. “The Treasury’s one-page note is a pathetic joke,” Jason Furman, a professor of Practice at Harvard Kennedy School and former Chairman of Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, told me. “I feel awful for the dozens of talented Treasury economists who have worked for years developing sophisticated models for dynamic analysis and dynamic scoring only to be completely shut out of this process. Instead of doing an analysis, the Treasury Department assumed a can opener, using an assumption they made about growth in the budget they put together long before they even had a tax-reform plan. Then they mechanically calculated the consequences of that growth assumption for the budget finding that the tax cuts pay for themselves, a result that a consensus of top economists in the recent Booth survey rejected.”

As David Kamin, a professor at N.Y.U. law school, put it: “This is not an analysis of the legislation. It tells us nothing about what this legislation would actually do.” To economist Ernie Tedeschi, the one-pager “reads like it was done over the weekend . . . this report should not be taken seriously. It is not a score. It is not an economic analysis.“ Furman and Tedeschi both echoed the idea that the meager one-pager shouldn’t be viewed as a black mark on Treasury staffers, but as an indication that they were pressured into putting something out that is not backed by economic evidence. “It’s a pathetic excuse for a study,” former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers told me. “I suspect the current staff are not happy that the relevant data has been suppressed in the administration’s attempts to obscure the truth.”

How did Mnuchin & Co. arrive at such a singular conclusion? First, they used the Trump administration’s projections of a 2.9 percent real G.D.P. growth rate over 10 years cited in its 2018 budget. As a reminder, no one, including the the Congressional Budget Office, actually believes that this sort of growth is at all in the realm of possible. As Summers tweeted on Monday, “Why would anyone think it relevant to project tax revenues from a forecast that is outside the range of professional consensus? If I can assume I could serve at 150 mph, I could derive the conclusion that I could compete with Roger Federer.” Then there’s the even bigger asterisk, which relies on one line about “a combination of regulatory reform, infrastructure development, and welfare reform” and literally no further details. In other words, Mnuchin et al. feel comfortable saying that the Senate tax plan would raise $1.8 trillion over 10 years through savings derived from plans that—wait for it—do not, and may never, exist. Remember “Infrastructure Week”? The Treasury might as well be saying, “This tax plan will 100 percent work if a million other things that are little more than ideas scribbled on a cocktail napkin happen first.”

Perhaps even more disturbing than Mnuchin‘s declaration that the tax plan will pay for itself presupposing X, Y, and Z, is that line about welfare reform. The administration may not have come up with much on the infrastructure front beyond some prop comedy involving Trump picking up a binder and dropping it on the floor, but it is currently laying the groundwork to hamstring the social safety net. Now, the Treasury is saying that lawmakers must make deep cuts to things like Medicare, Medicaid, and food stamps in order to lower taxes on corporate America without blowing out the deficit.

It’s not totally clear why, at the eleventh hour, when both the House and Senate tax plans have passed through the first ring of fire and are inching closer to Trump’s desk by the day, Mnuchin decided to release this report—probably to get the Inspector General off his back. It’s also not clear if he thinks people will actually believe it, or if he cares either way. As a former Treasury staffer told me, “Tim Geithner used to have a saying, ‘There are people who are here for the scene, there are people who are here for the cause, and there are people who are here for the craft.’ Mnuchin is clearly a scene guy.” In other words, he’s in it for the photo ops with money.

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Speaking of taxes...

Bloomberg reports that on the same day Mnuchin rubber-stamped the Senate’s plan, finance ministers from France, Germany, the U.K., Spain, and Italy warned that the current proposals “may risk having a major distortative impact on international trade” by breaking international treaties related to double taxation. Another measure, the ministers wrote, would potentially hurt insurers and international banks that do business in the United States because they “would be treated as nondeductible and subject to a 10 percent tax.” We’re sure the G.O.P., Team Trump, and Mnuchin totally saw this coming and already have a plan in place to deal with it.

This seems reasonable

“We’ve seen mortgages being taken out to buy bitcoin,” securities regulator Joseph Borg told CNBC on Monday. “People do credit cards, equity lines . . . This is not something a guy who’s making $100,000 a year, who's got a mortgage and two kids in college, ought to be invested in.”

Ray Dalio has the perfect passive-aggressive Christmas-gift idea

Nothing says Christmas spirit like a book detailing the various ways to rationalize telling your loved ones just how much they suck.

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