host: we talked earlier with aaron lorenzo about that. let me talk about this spending bill that needs to be approved before friday otherwise the prospect of a government shutdown. democrats holding firm on the issue of daca where does that stand? what are you hearing? guest: my best knowledge as far as i can tell is they're not much of anywhere. unlike the tax bill which is happening thru reconciliation, which can pass with a simple majority in the senate, any spending bill needs 60 votes in the senate. that empowers democrats to extract some sort of price and this is not a congress that sort of figured out in most cases how to have bipartisan achievements even on must-pass bills. they're back, backed themselves up against a late december deadline with government funding running out at the end of the week and they don't quite have a path to get there host: let's talk about this tax bill. we've got that letter yesterday from the chair of the senate finance committee, orrin hatch, basically say nothing deal was struck with senator bob cork

who lost, financially and politically, i am joined from washington, d.c., by politico reporter aaron lorenzo. let's be optimistic. who fares better because of this tax plan? >> i think a lot of taxpayers are going to feel ultimately that they're doing better. at least for a while. some of these individual tax cuts that-- they don't last. they expire after eight years in a lot of cases. but at least in the first couple of years of the new tax bill, there's going to be a much higher standard deduction, and they're going to have a lower tax-- lesof their income is going to be taxable going forward, again, least for these first few years. >> sreenivasan: so instead of trying to save all your receiptes of charitable contributions and so forth, you just get a higher bar that you automatically say to the government, "deduct this." >> that's right. a lot fewer of us will itemize, like you said won't have to save those receipts and tab everything up at the end of the year. and so the vacation of this bill think that that's going to be-- there's a lot of upside to that. >> sreenivasan: okay, let's tal