On Sunday, 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) appeared on CNN’s “State of the Union” with host Jake Tapper.

During the segment, Tapper asked Sanders about a 1974 comment in which the senator reportedly advocated for a wage cap.

TAPPER: Our investigative Kfile team found that early in your political career, way back in 1974, you said that it should be illegal to earn more money than someone could spend in his or her lifetime. You proposed a maximum wage cap on the highest earners.

SANDERS: What year was that?

TAPPER: It was 45 years ago.

SANDERS: Jake, in all due respect, [that was] seven years before I was [elected]. Did you go back to my third-grade essay when I was in P.S. 197 about what I said?

TAPPER: You were a grown man in your 30s.

SANDERS: Yeah, but that was 50 years ago. Let’s talk about my mayor’s record where I was a transformative mayor, re-elected three times. You know, we can go back to things that I said in the 70s. I don’t think it’s productive. I’ve been a senator for 14 years, a congressman for 16 years – but here’s the bottom line. This is what I do believe. When you have three people who own more wealth than the bottom half of America; when half of our people are living paycheck to paycheck; when 500,000 Americans are sleeping out in the street, yes, the rich have gotta pay, and the large corporations have gotta pay their fair share of taxes. We will raise taxes vary substantially on billionaires. No apologies for that.

TAPPER: But you do not favor a wage cap as you once proposed? That’s the only question.

SANDERS: 50 years ago, mmm. Look, what I just said is when you have massive levels of income and wealth inequality – by the way, in the last three years under Trump, the billionaire class has seen a hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars increase in their wealth. The average American worker has seen less than a 1% increase in real wages last year. All right, that’s the issue that we’ve got to deal with right now. We need an economy that works for working people, not just for the billionaire class, which is what we have under Trump’s economy.