What is your gauge of where the sort of intellectual consensus is among your peers on this right now?

That's a good question. That's a tough question because I think it's fair to say that...

They're not psyched.

Yeah.

Hello and welcome to Why is this happening with me, your host, Chris Hayes.

Well, the 2020 Democratic primary is in full swing. It's heating up.

Trying to think of other news cliches I could use. We're in the final stretch. We're not in the final stretch.

That's another news cliché about campus. One thing, it's just crazy the way that news cliches

infect your brain when you work in news and then you have to like work hard to knock them out.

But one of the most interesting axes of disagreement or debate within the Democratic Party and the

Democratic Coalition and among the primary candidates is on taxation and specifically about

a proposal that has been proposed by two candidates in the race, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders,

to attempt to use the tax system to reduce some of the vast inequality in American society.

And that inequality has been written about and talked about a ton. I think it's written and talked

about by basically every candidate and the Democratic Party at this point. It's established very well in the data.

There's not a whole lot of disagreement about whether there is been rising inequality. There's an

incredible concentration of wealth. And for a long time, a lot of the discussion about how to

deal with that had to do with income taxes. And you know, income taxes have gotten more

aggressive at the federal level over time. There was a cut in the top marginal rate in the

Trump tax cuts that were passed back in 2017 that have now taken effect. That has exacerbated that

inequality. And then there's a whole bunch of other features of the tax system that allow people

to talk to gain the tax system such that they often pay a lower effective rate than people in the

...