The gift that keeps taking

At least muggers usually have the decency to flee the scene of the crime. The perpetrators of the Great Tax Robbery of 2017 gloated and cheered what they’d wrought with passage of the monster tax bill on Wednesday. That’s House Speaker Paul Ryan, who already salivates at the possibilities for cutting back the social safety net, spanning Medicare and Social Security, now that Congress pushes the federal deficit at least $1.5 trillion deeper into a deep hole.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who cheaply bought votes with special favors for Republican members who’d expressed legitimate doubts about the wisdom of a bill rushed toward law in a frenzy.

And yes, oh yes, President Trump, who receives the Christmas gift he demanded, feet stomped, allowing him to claim even a single legislative success in a first year in office marked by a failed Obamacare repeal, executive orders overturned in court and compatriots facing criminal charges.

Trump deceptively, insultingly called the slapdash bill he’s about to sign “one of the great gifts to the middle income people of this country.” If so, the tax overhaul is the kind of gift that falls apart not long after it’s unwrapped.

The hurried, partisan race to get it (not a single Democrat voted yes) produced a law with huge risks and unknowns, but we do know where the money is headed.

An analysis by the Tax Policy Center shows the wealthiest 5% of households seeing outsize gains in the short term and accounting for nearly all the nation’s after-tax income boosts a decade hence.

Especially big gains will meanwhile go to heirs of multimillion-dollar estates made exempt from taxation, and to corporations that will see their rates slashed just as lobbyists hoped.

Visions that tax cuts will generate an upsurge of new middle-class wealth have as much substance as sugar plum fairies.

Here in the real world, especially big losses will be felt New Yorkers and people in other states who dare levy income and property taxes in order to provide decent services and safety nets for their residents — losses little blunted by a compromise to allow for state and local taxes to be deducted up to $10,000.

This as good as lifts tens of billions of dollars out of the hands of New Yorkers next year and the year after that and after that and hands it to the federal treasury, even though New York already pays more to the federal government than the state gets back.

To the majority of New York’s GOP congressional delegation who voted no in disgust — Reps. Dan Donovan, John Faso, Pete King, Elise Stefanik and Lee Zeldin — you tried, against the odds. To the rest, good luck getting reelected.

Brace for painful times ahead as state and city necessarily adjust to a new fiscal reality inflicted with malice aforethought.