It is tax day, April 15th, and a rainy one on the Upper East Side of Manhattan where Gustavus "Gus" Christensen, a Democrat running to fill a rare open city seat in the New York State Assembly, works from his compact, ground level home office. Christensen sits in front of a closed HP laptop. His campaign manager, on the payroll for about a month, sits in front of a 27-inch Apple Thunderbolt Display. Outside, commuters are soaked in the downpour.

The Assembly district that Christensen hopes to represent is the (relatively) poorer half of the wealthiest Congressional district in the United States. The 42-year-old candidate left a post as managing director of Evercore Partners, a boutique investment bank, to run for the seat. He previously worked at J.P. Morgan (pre-merger with Chase) and Goldman Sachs.

Typical Wall Street, floor to ceiling on the diploma wall, too. Graduate school for Christensen was the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and he was a Yale undergraduate where he served as campus coordinator for moderate Democrat Paul Tsongas, then contesting the Democratic Party presidential primary.

For his first race, Christensen believes he'll need to raise half a million dollars. He's already gathered $145,000 from donors and has lent his campaign another $250,000. It will be an expensive election. Three cycles ago, candidates in the neighboring district spent $3 million to fill an open seat. Inflation, it seems, is everywhere in New York. That's one of the reasons Christensen is running.

Christensen's antagonists already have created his fake Twitter account portraying him both as Mr. Monopoly and Thurston Howell III from Gilligan's Island. But check out a Bloomberg terminal and you'll see his recent Bloomberg television interview touted as "Banker Dumps Wall Street To Boost Taxes On The Rich." To some he's a ruthless one-percenter out to buy political power. To others, he is a class traitor.

He still dresses the banker role — baby blue shirtsleeves and a navy tie. But the real banker comes out in conversation. Successful bankers see possibilities where others do not, particularly in a business context. They must refine pitches of transformative scenarios to wary executives. They must often sell solutions to people who do not see the problems in front of themselves.

J. Carter Rinaldi/Getty Images News

The gap between rich and poor, then, is a problem that Christensen wants to help solve. That's his pitch. Now, he has to convince some of the wealthiest voters in the city to go along.

There is where the script flips, where everything said above no longer colors the perfect picture of caricatured Wall Street greed.

Yes, he plans to modestly raise taxes on the rich. But that's not enough.

"Raising taxes is not the point," he says. "The goal is to make targeted and systematic investments into important government programs that will lead to meaningful benefits for people, that will encourage economic growth and that will reduce inequality over time."

Christensen knows budgets, business and the economy and he speaks like a city candidate for the populist era of newly minted Mayor Bill de Blasio. The reason for this, Christensen explains, is that progressive ideas actually make sense in our current economic situation, marked by a moribund recovery in the years after the Financial Crisis. His first priority is education spending. Mayor de Blasio went to Albany and secured funding for universal pre-kindergarten in public schools, but he wants more.

"That is just a first step," says Christensen. "We should have two full years of Pre-K, including full day options and full day kindergarten everywhere in the city (which New York City doesn't have now). We should have universal daycare from birth to help working parents."

In his district, long a residential one, overcrowded schools are now the norm. He grew up in Park Slope, Brooklyn. When he was in elementary school he remembers the construction of a "mini-school" made of metal trailers that housed the fifth grade class. Now when he drives by he still sees trailers on the old campus. Make-do fixes from the distant past — outmoded, even at the time — have been rigged into permanent solutions.

"This is a city and state that is fantastically wealthier than it was 100 or 75 years ago when most of the schools were built," says Christensen.

Christensen also wants to give affordable housing a boost, and that's not just a New York City problem. In Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago and Miami, rental rates are pushing 40 percent of median income. The traditionally accepted definition of affordable rent is 30 percent of income. Christensen wants an expanded Section 8 Housing program that provides rental assistance to 2.1 million households through the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development could ameliorate the problem.

Ideologically, it's something you'd figure Wall Street would want nothing to do with.

Because the currently divided federal government will not act, Christensen thinks the state government should raise the minimum wage and expand the Earned Income Tax Credit so that, combined, work will be worth at least $15 an hour in the state.

"New York has been a progressive beacon in this country for more than 100 years," he says. "We can show the rest of the country the way."

Stan Honda/AFP

Stan Honda/AFP

So far, he says, his former colleagues from the financial sector have been universally supportive. This is no surprise. Wall Street is not, strictly speaking, politically conservative or liberal. There are far too many people involved to expect a political monolith. The political culture of the financial sector, however, has been recently defined by utterances from venture capitalist Tom Perkins, who compared the plight of San Francisco's rich to those of Jews during Kristaalnacht.

The truth is that New York's financial class does not immediately decamp to New Jersey, Connecticut, Florida or Texas at the first sign of a tax increase. There are other, more important reasons — the culture, the aesthetic — to live and work in the city that former Mayor Michael Bloomberg once classified as a "luxury good."

There is, however, some Ayn Rand style Libertarianism at work on the Street.

"There is a natural Ayn Randian trap that a lot of successful people in the country fall into," says Christensen. "People who are very competitive and successful worked very hard in high school to get good grades and to get into good colleges where they worked hard and found good jobs where they worked hard and were fast-tracked. Also, these people are smart. It's true, they are smart and hard working and without being those things they could not have succeeded.

"But then they begin to believe that anyone who is smart and hard working will also succeed. And that is the trap. They leave out the other factors of the success equation."

The right, he says, has fixated on the threat of creeping Socialism even as Democrats are seizing on formerly Republican ideas like the Earned Income Tax Credit, Section 8 Housing and Obamacare to get things done. Meanwhile, the real threat is that Republicans will eliminate the estate tax and continue to cut marginal tax rates and capital gains taxes for the wealthiest Americans. He fears it could lead to an oligarchy that will look more Downton Abbey than New York City.

If he wins his bid, Christensen will become one of 150 Assembly representatives (this is the lower house of the state legislature) in a state where the governor wields considerable executive power. Christensen's more radical ideas will not be loudly heard. Still, he'll be a champion for the end inequality at the cross-section of two places — government and Wall Street — where creating practices for the rich to get richer at the expense of the poor is already a quiet cottage industry.

At Yale, Christensen studied with Robert J. Shiller, the Nobel laureate who predicted the housing collapse. Shiller recently proposed that the tax system be indexed to inequality. This would allow rates on the rich to climb while credits accrue for the working poor during times of high inequality — and rates would ease on the wealthy as the wealth gap contracts.

Christensen says it's not just about that. He speaks about ways to curb excessive executive compensation or the effects of private equity on public enterprise.

All of it comes back to his conviction that we are really talking about one, big question: What kind of society do we want to have?

"No sane person would rather live in the old kleptocracies of Latin America where a small group of wealthy people hide behind high walls," he says. "I don't want to live there and I know that the New York's 76th district doesn't want to live there either."

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io