Before Graham Platner was forced to bail from his Maine Senate bid over multiple allegations of domestic violence and sexual abuse, the silver spoon “democratic” socialist said something dumb enough that it should have proven as disqualifying as the Nazi tattoo.
“My definition of working class these days is essentially anybody who makes money from wages,” Platner said. “If you work for a living and you go out and put in hours and you pay taxes just like everyone else, I think that’s quite fair.”
At the time, Platner was ridiculed despite his public posturing as the Democratic Party’s new working-class everyman. Though he did not fit that definition, as the son of an upscale restaurateur and an attorney. And as someone who survived on 100% disability benefits. But it’s Platner’s definition itself that deserves derision since his broad definition of “working class” is so vast as to be rendered useless. It’s also a recurring obfuscation designed by socialists. To divert attention from the fact that working-class people would see a dramatically higher tax bill to pay for their policy wish list.
For starters, the share of people who make the overwhelming majority of their living from wage income is largely among those not yet retired. The top 1% of 35-year-olds are bringing in an average of $460,011. Over 90% of which comes from their salaries or wages. Not from capital gains or other non-labor income. Income from the top 1% of 45-year-olds stems 97% of income from their labor. And the top 1% of 55-year-olds, over 85%. America’s richest 10%, far from being idle nobility, work over four hours per week longer than our poorest decile.
During an interview with the New York Times, the Big Apple’s socialist superstar of a mayor tried to refine the “working class” definition only to make it even less comprehensible. While Zohran Mamdani initially parroted Platner’s platitude that to be working class means merely “if you have to work to pay your bills.” But when the Gray Lady pushed back on whether Mamdani would consider a lawyer earning a quarter-million dollars a year, Mamdani narrowed the definition by expanding it.
“I’ve drawn [the line] at about a million dollars a year,” said Mamdani, who went on to try and equivocate by rejecting the importance of even having a definition of the term, but with one major accidental admission: “Yes, I do want to raise taxes on people who make more than a million dollars a year.”
The only material difference delineated by the socialists’ “working class” obsession is that anyone who doesn’t fit the definition will foot the bill. That’s what makes it telling that Mamdani, Platner, and the rest of the socialists don’t define the term as non-college graduates, people of color, union members, or even blue-collar workers as opposed to service workers. Rather, downwardly mobile trust fund brats who got kicked out of $71,000 boarding schools (Platner) get to feel like they stand in solidarity with actual factory workers and single moms just because they racked up six figures in student debt.
And the reason that this nonsensical definition is as malicious as it is moronic is that reserving tax hikes for seven-figure earners and a nearly nonexistent class of uberwealthy who generate the bulk of their income from assets rather than labor cannot remotely pay for the Democratic Socialists of America’s promises. When “the Squad’s” lodestar policy proposal of Medicare for All was first scored in 2018, economists estimated it would cost some $32 trillion over one decade, or well north of $43 trillion in 2026 dollars. Liquidating all of the assets of the nation’s top 1% would generate a one-time payment of barely that much.
The reality is affording the sort of universal healthcare enjoyed in Europe requires charging the sort of universal taxation rates of Europe’s working classes. The Cato Institute found that the average worker in Europe paid roughly half of their earnings in taxes, or nearly $12,000 more in annual taxes than the average American. The figure held across the income scale: A single worker earning $50,000 in 2024 paid 43% of their income in taxes in Europe but only 29% in the U.S.
Medicare for All, of course, is only the tip of the iceberg for the insurgent faction of the Democratic Party. On top of universal healthcare, the DSA’s party platform calls for extending welfare to all illegal immigrants while ending all deportations, canceling all student debt, offering universal pre-K, passing a Green New Deal, and establishing “public ownership of the largest corporations and essential industries to ensure democratic control and accountability to the people.”
Any plebian with a calculator and ChatGPT could tally all these campaign promises up and realize that the actual working class would have to see massive tax hikes to bankroll these proposals, so DSA disciples have to hope that you’re as dumb as they are and claim that you — even the lawyers, investment bankers, doctors, and trust fund losers who squandered unprecedented privilege to join the professional activist class — are a member of the working class. Implicit in that promise is a lie that you will not be made to foot the bill.
Tiana Lowe Doescher (@TianaTheFirst) is an economics columnist for the Washington Examiner.