Justin Elliott is a reporter for ProPublica.

And for the last year, he's been trying to understand the secret language of taxes.

How did you prep to cover taxes?

Like, were taxes always your jam like you wanted to learn about the tax code?

No, not at all. Actually, I had a very painful period at the beginning of this year where I started

going to American Bar Association tax law conferences.

Justin says when you show up at one of these conferences, it's kind of like going to a foreign

country.

As a layperson, you sort of understand maybe 20% of what's being talked about.

But what you do understand very quickly is that there's an army of very, very smart people in suits who do understand this and spend all their time thinking about it

and sort of working the tax code.

It sounds like at a tax conference, every panel is just about how to not pay taxes.

That's a lot of them.

But using acronyms and jargon that make it basically impossible to understand for a normal person.

Over the last year or so, this new kind of tax conference crept up all about what's called an opportunity zone.

Justin says, these two words, they mean different things to different people.

If you listen to the pundits on CNBC talk about

opportunity zones, they'll refer to the program one way. But this idea, since it came out,

really is a transformative, potentially transformative program that will unleash private capital

into some of the areas of our country that need it most.

Justin, he explains it a little differently.

You know, it gets called the Opportunity Zone program, and obviously the word tax and the phrase

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