Democratic Socialists of America co-chair Megan Romer had a straightforward message about wealthy Americans: tax them heavily.
Putting an actual number on that proposal proved considerably more difficult.
Romer ran into trouble during Friday’s episode of The New Yorker Radio Hour, when New Yorker editor David Remnick pressed her to explain exactly what the DSA means when it talks about “taxing the hell out of millionaires.”
“Well, what does ‘taxing the hell out of them’ mean?” Remnick asked.
That was where the wheels started wobbling.
“Uhhhh, yeah, you know, again, I don’t have like a solid [answer], but—” Romer responded, chuckling as she searched for an answer.
Remnick immediately spotted the problem.
“But shouldn’t you?” he asked.
“Um, that’s a good question,” Romer replied.
Remnick wasn’t finished.
“If you’re the co-chair of the DSA, shouldn’t you be more specific than ‘taxing the hell’ out of something?”
Romer then shifted away from offering a specific tax rate and toward describing how such a policy might eventually be determined.
“So again, it’s democracy, right?” she said. “And we have to look at what we have to spend and what we need. We don’t want to depend on the existence of millionaires because that means people are still getting exploited.”
“So yeah, we need to look at what we need to pay for in the interim, what sort of tax base we need for that to happen, and build from there,” she continued.
It was a striking exchange precisely because Remnick wasn’t demanding an obscure technical detail. He was asking the co-chair of a political organization to define one of its own economic prescriptions.
Romer had moments earlier indicated that billionaires were a greater concern for her than millionaires, arguing that most billionaires had “exploited the working class” to accumulate their wealth.
But the interview arrives as the DSA is attracting attention for reasons extending well beyond interviews and activist meetings.
Several democratic socialist candidates recently won Democratic primaries. In New York, Darializa Avila Chevalier and Claire Valdez, both DSA members, secured primary victories with the backing of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, himself a DSA member.
The organization’s agenda also stretches beyond taxation. The DSA publicly opposes President Donald Trump’s immigration policies, describing them as “racist,” and opposes the U.S. alliance with Israel. The organization has accused Israel of committing “genocide” in Gaza.
Trump, unsurprisingly, has responded to the socialist candidates with his own characteristic restraint — which is to say, none whatsoever.
Following the primary results, Trump sarcastically congratulated Mamdani for helping get “solid Communists” elected.
Within days, his language became more serious. Trump claimed communists were beginning to “make their move” in the United States.
“The game is on,” he said.
The president has repeatedly attacked socialism and communism in recent speeches. During his Fourth of July address, Trump called communism a “cancer” requiring immediate attention.
He was even less delicate during a July appearance in Georgia.
“With communism, everything turns to sh*t!” Trump declared.
Romer, of course, was discussing democratic socialism rather than identifying herself as a communist, and Trump’s description of his political opponents reflects his own characterization of them. But Remnick’s interview exposed a much narrower problem that doesn’t require ideological name-calling to understand.
If a political organization wants substantially higher taxes on wealthy Americans, basic questions follow: How high should those taxes be? Who exactly should pay them? How much revenue would they raise? What programs would that revenue finance?
Romer’s answer was essentially that those details still need to be worked out democratically based on spending requirements and the necessary tax base.
Maybe the plan really is still being ironed out.
But when the co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America is asked what “taxing the hell out of millionaires” means and responds, “I don’t have like a solid” answer, Remnick’s four-word follow-up becomes awfully difficult to improve upon:
“But shouldn’t you?”
