CNBC's John Harwood sat down with 2020 candidate Pete Buttigieg to discuss economic change and his approach to fixing problems in the system today.
In the sprawling 2020 Democratic field, Pete Buttigieg may be the unlikeliest serious contender of all.
As he prepares to formally announce on Sunday, Buttigieg sat down on Monday with CNBC Editor at Large John Harwood at a veterans service organization in Las Vegas to discuss his approach to economic change. What follows is a condensed, edited transcript of their conversation.
And a lot of this is the consequence of what you might call the Reagan consensus. There was a period where even Democrats seemed to operate in this framework that assumes that the only thing you'd ever do with a tax is cut it. That those tax cuts were assumed to pay for themselves. The empirical collapse of that supply side consensus, I think, is one of the defining moments of this period that we're living through.
Pete Buttigieg: Sure, it's lifted so many out of poverty. And by the way, there are ways that it can work for us at home, too. But again, we're seeing a concentration of wealth and power that skews things in the opposite direction. One reason you see traditionally conservative sectors like the military and like the business community way ahead of, for example, conservative politicians in this country on the issue of climate, is that the market, too, is beginning to recognize the stakes of failing to act and simply accepting what will eventually will be trillions of dollars in damage. It's not the planet as an abstraction that's going to be harmed. It's people. It's us.
John Harwood: Warren's wealth tax would raise something on the order of $2.7 trillion over 10 years. Is that the order of magnitude you're talking about? John Harwood: How powerful is a racial consideration when you think about the scale of things that need to be done for the entire country? I also think that, no matter how educated or intelligent some of the people working in these industries are, they can quickly get out of touch with the reality on the ground.
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