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“Being left of Obama doesn’t make you extremely progressive,” Pete Buttigieg told me last week, when we met in Chicago to record a conversation for the new episode of “The Argument” podcast.

My question to Buttigieg — the mayor of South Bend, Ind., and a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate — had been about tax policy. Specifically, I wanted to know whether he supported an annual wealth tax and how high he thought the top marginal income tax rate should be.

He said he did support a wealth tax, arguing that it was not so different from a property tax. On income taxes, he said something I hadn’t heard him, or anyone else, say before: He is intrigued by a top rate of 49.9999 percent. “There’s something about paying the majority of a dollar that comes your way to Uncle Sam that I think people have more trouble with,” he explained. He also said he would favor a financial transaction tax.