Graham Platner, a Democrat running for Senate in Maine, said in a recent interview with More Perfect Union that small businesses and the middle class often end up bearing the burden when the government claims to target billionaires with higher taxes because the government is not actually taxing the wealthy.
To many online, the argument sounded reminiscent of the old communist talking point that communism has never failed because real communism has never actually been tried.
Graham Platner tells a Maine voter that the reason why Tax-the-Rich schemes always end up hurting the middle class is because true Taxing-the-Rich has never been tried pic.twitter.com/bdTrrE4zUm
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"I think really everybody would talk about billionaires, right? Billionaires, this, this, and that. And it just seems like every time there's an effort to get after the billionaires, to get, you know, get them to pay a fair share, whatever, sounds great, you know, always sounds great, but every time you take that swing, it misses and slams the middle class," a Maine voter told Platner. "Instead of, like, hiring, what, 60,000 IRS agents that are going to go through all the small self-employed guys and, hey, where's your gas receipt, hassling us with that. There's got to be some way to bolster middle-class businesses, small businesses."
"Honestly, we are in 100 percent agreement," Platner replied. "I have a small Easter farm. And I run a small business and deal with all of the pain in the a** of dealing with that. For smaller operations, it's difficult to, like, be compliant. It's hard to, like, hit all the requirements because many of them are made specifically to incentivize the larger operations. They can hit it. But if you're a small farm, you don't have an extra $100,000 to go build some, you know, like, state-of-the-art facility. What it really does is it puts small operators out of business and only the big ones can maintain it. And suddenly we have more Walmarts, more Home Depots, less, less hardware stores. It all gets eaten up by these corporate entities."
"And I'm fully convinced it's not an accident. It's not a coincidence. This happens very much because establishing politicians write policies that are good for the people that lobby them and donate the most money to them. It's a huge problem," he added.
"But your question is kind of like, Graham, you talk about reigning in that power. But how do you make sure that you don't take a swing at the billionaires and hit a guy who's worried about..." an interviewer chimed in.
"I think, and I'll just be up front. I think that the reason that it's hit the middle class every time they try is that they're not actually trying," Platner said. "Because if they did, it would, it would bother the people that donate the most money to them. And in this political system, that's all any of these folks seem to care about."
This comes as Platner has openly expressed support for communism and faced scrutiny over other controversial positions, including support for Hamas and allegations surrounding a tattoo critics have claimed resembles Nazi imagery, which he has since covered up.
His comments on taxing the rich, however, only reflect a broader strain of Democratic dogmatism.
Democrats constantly complain that the wealthy do not pay their fair share, despite the fact that the top five percent of earners pay roughly 60 percent of all federal income taxes. While the left argues the rich should contribute more, higher earners already shoulder the bulk of the government’s tax burden. What Democrats rarely say outright is that they want the percentage, the spending, and the government’s authority over wealth and capital to keep expanding.