A co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America struggled to answer a basic question about her organization’s tax policy during a recent interview when pressed on how the group plans to fund its economic agenda.
DSA co-chair Megan Romer stumbled on Friday’s episode of The New Yorker Radio Hour podcast after editor David Remnick asked her to define what the group means by “taxing the hell out of millionaires.”
“Uhhhh, yeah, you know, again, I don’t have like a solid [answer], but—” Romer said, chuckling during the exchange.
When Remnick pressed whether the leader of the organization should have a clear answer, Romer responded, “Um, that’s a good question.”
Remnick pushed further, asking, “If you’re the co-chair of the DSA, shouldn’t you be more specific than ‘taxing the hell’ out of something?”
open image in gallery“So again, it’s democracy, right?” Romer 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.”
She added: “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.”
Just prior to the exchange, Romer told Remnick that her primary focus was on billionaires rather than millionaires, stating that most billionaires had “exploited the working class” to build their wealth.
The interview comes on the heels of recent Democratic primary victories by several democratic socialist candidates. In New York, card-carrying DSA members Darializa Avila Chevalier and Claire Valdez won their respective primaries with the backing of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who is also a member of the organization.
open image in galleryAccording to its website, the DSA advocates for a socialist economic agenda while opposing President Donald Trump’s “racist immigration policies” and the U.S. alliance with Israel, which the group accuses of committing a genocide in Gaza.
The primary victories drew criticism from Trump, who mockingly congratulated Mamdani on getting “solid Communists” elected before warning days later that communists were beginning to make “their move” in the country, as reported by Mediaite.
“The game is on,” Trump said.
Trump has repeatedly targeted socialism in recent speeches, describing communism as a “cancer” during a Fourth of July address in Washington, D.C., as reported by CBS News.
“Our warriors did not fight communism on battlefields across the world, only to have that menace rear its ugly head right back here in America,” Trump said during the speech. “It’s like a cancer, you got to cut it out.”