DSA Co-Chair Can't Name a Tax Rate for Her Own 'Tax the Hell Out of Millionaires' Plan

Democratic Socialists of America co-chair Megan Romer sat down with New Yorker editor David Remnick on The New Yorker Radio Hour and couldn't answer the most basic question about her own organization's signature tax policy: what's the number?

Romer told Remnick the DSA wants to "tax the hell out of millionaires." When he asked her to define that in terms of an actual rate or income threshold, she didn't have one.

"Yeah, you know, again, I don't have, like, a solid," Romer said, before Remnick cut in: "But shouldn't you? If you're the co-chair of the DSA, shouldn't you be more specific than 'taxing the hell' out of something?"

Romer's fallback was that tax policy should flow backward from spending. "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 said.

She also drew a distinction. Romer said she's more focused on billionaires than millionaires because, in her view, "most billionaires got their wealth because they exploited the working class in some very significant way usually." She framed the real question as "are we exploiting people," not some "arbitrary red line" on net worth.

That's a coherent moral argument if you buy the premise. It's just not a tax policy. A tax code built on litigating who "exploited" whom, case by case, is not a workable revenue system. It's a talking point standing in for one.

Republicans Jump On It

Republican National Committee spokesperson Natalie Baldassarre gave Fox News Digital a statement Sunday hammering Democrats over the exchange. "The Democrat Party is being driven off a cliff by socialists who are driving blindfolded while arguing about the view," Baldassarre said. "Unless Democrats hit the brakes, every candidate on the ballot will have to answer for socialists' outrageous beliefs that will bankrupt our country and strip every American of safety, sanity, and freedom."

That's RNC messaging, and it's doing what RNC messaging does: nationalizing a niche interview into a midterm cudgel. Romer is not an elected Democrat. She's not on any ballot. The DSA is a membership organization, not the Democratic Party, and plenty of Democratic officeholders have kept the DSA at arm's length precisely to avoid this kind of guilt-by-association.

But Baldassarre's underlying point isn't baseless. The DSA's growing influence inside Democratic primaries, especially in places like New York City, is real and documented. Zohran Mamdani's rise and his own rhetoric about wealthy New Yorkers paying their "fair share" has already made establishment Democrats nervous about being tied to the socialist label heading into November.

What's Actually True Here

Strip away the spin from both directions and the facts are simple. Romer, on the record, endorsed heavy taxation of millionaires and billionaires without offering a rate, bracket, or threshold. When pressed by a sympathetic interviewer at a left-leaning publication, not a hostile Fox News anchor, she still couldn't produce specifics.

Remnick asked a fair question any serious economics reporter would ask, and got a non-answer. He isn't Sean Hannity. The exchange happened on The New Yorker's own platform, with The New Yorker's own editor doing the pressing.

The fairest read of Romer's position is that the DSA sees taxation as downstream of a broader project: figure out what government should fund, then figure out how to pay for it, then figure out who's "exploiting" whom in the meantime. That's an ideological framework, not a bill. Whether that's a legitimate starting point for building policy or a way to avoid ever being pinned down on numbers is a fair question voters can decide for themselves.

"Tax the hell out of millionaires" without a number attached is a slogan, not a plan. Voters weighing socialist-aligned candidates on the ballot this November, from city councils to Congress, are entitled to ask the same question Remnick did and expect an actual answer.

No legislation has been introduced by DSA-aligned officials nationally that specifies these millionaire or billionaire tax rates as of this writing. Until one exists, this remains a rhetorical position, not a policy proposal, and both the DSA and its critics ought to be measured against that distinction going forward.