The following podcast contains explicit language.

Hello and welcome to the Powell's Books edition of Slate Money, your guide to the business and finance news of the week where we have tax cuts.

Or we don't have tax cuts yet.

But the Republicans have come out with 430 odd pages of proposals for tax cuts.

And we have read all of them.

Not even a little bit. Not even close.

But probably more than Donald Trump has.

But I am Felix Hammond of Fusion. I am here to help you navigate the thicket that is this proposed new tax code.

I am joined as ever by Jordan Weissman Anna Shamansky.

Hello.

Hello people.

Hello.

We are going to be talking about the new Fed chair, Mr. J. Powell.

We are going to be talking about opioids and Oxycontin and the Sackler family and a really good extremely long article

that you should probably read in the latest issue of the New Yorker. But first, we are going

to talk about taxes because I have a kind of rule on this show that we don't talk about vaporware

and we don't talk about legislation until it's actually legislation because, you know,

all manner of things get proposed, all manner of times. But this is a bill and it's a really

important bill and it will not exist in its current form but it is clearly the

benchmark of you know from which any final tax cut is going to be built and so it's important

and the headline is um well as we all knew one and a half trillion dollars in tax cuts in total.

Well, in deficit.

...