The Trump administration continued sort of a longstanding lack of interest in adequately funding the IRS and the tax

service in general. When we entered the Treasury Building on the first days of the

Biden administration, you know, we were coming off a long

period of underfunding for the IRS and that translates in the American experience into a lot of bad things.

Hello and welcome to Why is this happening with me your host Chris Hayes. Well, we are here for another edition of this year's special campaign franchise for With Pod, With Pod 2024, The Stakes,

in which we take a look at the policy records as president of each of the two major party nominees this year for the

first time since 1892 we have two men running against each other who both

served as president which means they both have records on policy issues.

You don't have to just listen to the campaign rhetoric.

You can actually look at what they've done.

And today, we're going to talk about one of the most important things

that the government does, one of the most contested sites of distribution,

redistribution, one of the materially most important areas of policy, and that is

tax policy. I think it's fair to say that both of these men have very different views of

taxes and what taxes are for but we can compare what they actually did and

today I thought it'd be a good idea to talk to someone who's an expert in this.

Kimberly Clauseing is the Eric M. Zelt chair in tax law and policy at the UCLA school law and

she actually served in government. She was the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Tax Analysis

in the U.S. Department of the Treasury,

served as the lead economist in the Office of Tax Policy

during the first part of the Biden administration.

Kimberly, welcome to the program.

...