Demos Vice President and Public Campaign board member Heather McGhee appeared on Up With Chris Hayes this weekend, tying the debates around our budget and economic inequality to our broken campaign finance system.

In talking about the debate over deficit reduction, she said, “What you have unfortunately is this sort of fault line in our democracy where you got the deficit reduction imperative is really a preoccupation of the donor class. The wealthy are twice as likely to want to cut spending to reduce the deficit than the general public. The majority of Americans want direct public job creation whereas that’s terrifying to wealthy Americans.”

And toward the end of the show she summed up our economic and political system this way (clip embedded below): “Well that's what happens when you have really record economic inequality at a moment of a campaign finance regime where…you can dollar for dollar translate that economic inequality into political inequality.”