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Let's all read the thousand plus pages of the evolving tax and spending bill in Congress, but until you do, we'll have some cheat-sheets.

I'm David Brancaccio in Los Angeles. The Senate is working through the massive tax and spending bill. The House has passed its version, but the two plans have to be reconciled.

Republicans are pushing to do this without the support of Democrats,

a fraught process that requires nearly all Republicans to agree. Now, this week, we're looking at some key ways. This could affect the budgets of households and businesses. Marketplace's senior

Washington correspondent Kimberly Adams has been swimming in the vast ocean of this evolving

legislation, and we'll start broad

brush. Hey, Kimberly. Hey, David. Fundamentally, when you step away from all these details, the reason

for this legislation is many people want to keep the 2017 tax cuts from expiring, which would

raise taxes on nearly everybody if it were to expire.

Now, in the legislation on the table now, are there any other changes to the tax rates themselves?

The rates would stay mostly the same as the 2017 law. But this whole thing about extending the

tax cuts actually gets into an interesting debate about

those 2017 tax cuts. You'll hear that everybody got a tax cuts and that lower income people

got bigger tax cuts than higher income people. That's what some people have as their narrative.

But you'll also hear from others that most of the benefits of the tax cuts went to wealthier Americans.

And both of those narratives are kind of true.

Here's Adam Michelle, who's Director of Tax Policy Studies at the Libertarian Cato Institute.

Some of the larger tax cuts will go to the higher-income Americans, and that's driven by the fact that higher-income Americans pay the lion's share of income taxes.

Lots of lower income Americans end up not owing federal taxes anyway, so a tax rate cut or an extension of one may not feel like much.

All right. So a lot of people also focused on the standard deduction where you don't have to itemize to just lop it off.

And the child tax credit, give us some more details on changes there.

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