SHERRILL UNLEASHES ON X, BUT WON’T SAY ‘TAX THE RICH’

Running a centrist campaign, Mikie Sherrill is maybe being too cautious by half

Sometimes you need a quick summary of what a politician has said, and sometimes you really benefit from a complete transcript. Representative Mikie Sherrill, who’s running for governor, has emerged, according to most polls (it’s still early), as the frontrunner. For the most part, she’s been running a cautious, middle-of-the-road campaign, with Ras Baraka and Steve Fulop to her left and Josh Gottheimer and Steve Sweeney to her right. Some would say it’s a play-it-safe strategy, avoiding anything that might offend the voters she’s targeting.

And, unlike her competitors to her left, Sherrill has resisted saying anything in support of raising taxes on wealthy and ultra-wealthy New Jerseyans. It’s not a radical idea: last month, The New Jersey Democrat ran a story about a tax plan put forward by New Jersey Policy Perspective, a progressive thinktank, that proposed ways to close the state’s budget gap by taxing those who can afford it.

But first: this week, Sherrill surprised us – and maybe some of her opponents – by unleashing a rhetorical blast of fire and brimstone against the Trump-Musk axis on X, that thing that used to be called Twitter. We’ll quote from that extensively in a bit. But oddly enough, her X-ish onslaught, while bracing, didn’t include much – well, anything really – on what Sherrill wants to do. That is, she didn’t outline a fighting program for the Democrats, and for the next governor, whoever he or she is. Especially striking is that Sherrill, in response to questions from TNJD, didn’t say anything at all about the need to raise taxes on New Jersey’s millionaires (yes, Bernie, and billionaires) to balance the state’s out of kilter budget.

On Tuesday, at a press event in Bloomfield, The New Jersey Democrat pressed her on the tax issue. That’s the transcript you’ll see below. Please read it carefully. (In it, you’ll see the hint of at least one bold idea from Sherrill: having New Jersey create its own health care system “from the ground up.”) But, alas, she avoided the tax-the-rich question over and over again.

Meanwhile, her X blast – in a fifteen-post thread – was great.

“Democrats need to be willing to play hardball, put results over process, and disrupt institutions. And unlike this administration, we need to do it in service of working people, instead of billionaires and oligarchs,” she wrote. “[They’re] working to gut Medicaid, hollowing out the Social Security Administration, enacting tariffs that make our goods more expensive, threatening our public schools – and shredding the Constitution as they go.”

She concluded: “I believe, to my core, that strong Democratic governors are the way forward. Democratic governors who fix our institutions, make peoples’ lives better, and offer an alternative to the chaos and destruction in Washington. That’s how we win back power.”

True – but Democratic voters want to be inspired by the idea that Democrats are committed to bold programs that mean real change for real people, which is why tens of thousands of people are flocking to hear Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez in red districts out West. Tax the billionaires – and use that money for an expanded safety net and rebuilding infrastructure. (Okay, there are only five billionaires in New Jersey. But there are lots of millionaires, including 33,000 people who earn more than $1 million a year.)

Anyway, the whole X thing is worth reading, and it’s the kind of stuff that we here at TNJD wish everyone in the party, especially our elected leaders, were saying. Some are, of course, including at least some of her competitors running for New Jersey governor.

But, in the press briefing in Bloomfield, and later in a one-on-one exchange with The New Jersey Democrat, Sherrill just couldn’t bring herself to say that if elected governor she’ll propose taxing the rich. Asked repeatedly (you be the judge), she ducked the question or answered a question that wasn’t asked.

First, here was our (slightly edited) exchange in public Q&A:

TNJD Are you willing to say that you’ll raise taxes on the wealthy?

Sherrill We do need to get rid of the SALT tax. But what I’m hearing from people is really how inefficiencies in permitting are driving up costs. Or, the fact that we can’t get solar, the cheapest form of power in the grid. Other states increased the use of solar power 150 percent, and New Jersey is just up 25 percent. Again and again, you see this intransigence…

TNJD Right, but to answer the question, will you support taxing the rich, raising the millionaires’ tax, the mansion tax? Or not? It’s a simple question: yes or no?

Sherrill Well, I think we’re already doing that right now. We need other innovative solutions…

TNJD So, no is the answer.

Sherrill That’s not what I said. That is not funding transit. That is not funding house building. That is not what we need. We need to drive down costs, and we need to be innovative. If we’re gonna fund the pension system, we can’t just keep going on with the status quo.

She might have simply said: “Sure, I’m open to raising taxes on the wealthy.” (When they asked Willie Sutton, the legendary bank robber, why he robbed banks, he said: “Because that’s where the money is.”) Unlike Sutton’s occupation, it’s perfectly legal for governments to get money from the rich. Even from banks.

Later, in the one-on-one interview with TNJD, Sherrill had her story, and she was sticking to it.

TNJD You seem to be running a center type campaign, letting Baraka and Fulop have the left lane and Sweeney and Gottheimer have the right lane, and you don’t seem to be willing to flip the table over. You’re not calling for taxing the rich. Are you afraid of saying, ‘I’m gonna tax those guys’?

Sherrill I think what we’re saying is, you’ve gotta do more than that. Some people say they’re gonna cut taxes, some people say they’re gonna tax the rich. I think what we need to focus on is real ideas, and if we need to do different things, we’ll do different things. But what we need to focus on is, how are we going to run the state better?

TNJD True. But, why not? You say we need to do more than that. But why not raise taxes on the rich?

Sherrill Because that’s too easy to say.

TNJD [Laughing.] It’s the hardest thing for a politician to say, no?

Sherrill Look, at the end of the day, you go to Texas and you want to build something, and you’ve got a permit in four days. And it’s not…

TNJD Right, okay. Another example. You’ve talked about defending Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. And cuts are coming, and that’s a danger. But Bernie and AOC are on a whole tour now saying, we’ve got to expand Social Security, expand Medicare and Medicaid, lower the age limits and raise the income qualifications. Yes or no?

Sherrill If you’re talking about actually funding them, so they’re not going to go under in a decade, we need to invest more in them.

TNJD And how do we do that?

Sherrill Well, we get a new president, to start with. And a new Senate, and a new House.

TNJD Right. Okay, so you’re president. How do you do it? With Social Security there’s an income cap for FICA, for the Social Security and Medicare tax. It’s about $160,000. Why not remove that and tax income to infinity?

Sherrill I’d want to see…

TNJD No, no.

Sherrill I’m not gonna say that.

TNJD Come on. You’ve studied this.

Sherrill Other people say, do this, do that. The president says he doesn’t care if there’s a recession. If we’re gonna reform the health care system in the state, it’s really difficult if you don’t know if they’re gonna cut off all the money. So this isn’t simply a position of taxing certain people. … If you think that there’s some easy fix, that we’re just gonna do XYZ, that is not the case. What I’d like to see is us clawing back federal funding.

TNJD But focusing on Social Security, if it has a danger, in ten years, as you say, of going belly up….

Sherrill It does.

TNJD … Then why not support removing the FICA cap?

Sherrill That’s a really interesting idea. I’d like to explore that. But, again, I’d like to see the wholistic program. You’re saying, like one thing, and then suddenly it’s all…

TNJD Right, and that’ll do it. And Social Security is sound for fifty years. You know the numbers.

Sherrill I think that’s a very interesting proposal. I do. And thinking through how we’re going to fix the nation’s broken health care system …

TNJD How about single payer? Do you like that?

Sherrill We’re talking about New Jersey. I’m running for governor of New Jersey. And the problem we have is that so much of this is run through the federal government. So we’re a donor state, and a lot of our taxation comes back into us, and as you look at what we should do with our health care system, is there an opportunity for us to say, if you’re not gonna pay into our health care system, as you’re obligated to go by Congress, then we’re gonna claw back that money and run our own health care system. Do other Democratic governors want to do that in their states? Is there an innovative model? Do we start from the ground up running our health care system, because the federal government is attacking working people?

TNJD You can collapse all the federal health care money into one pot, and set up your own state system. That’s been talked about. But, it’s hard to do.

Sherrill But maybe we’re coming to a time when that’s something to consider, right? … Is this an opportunity? What does a new health care system look like? Can you run it state by state? Can we run a northeastern health care system, with other Democratic states? There’s a lot to be explored right now.

TNJD Last question. We just did a piece on Josh Gottheimer, reporting that he’s number one in all of Congress on getting money from Wall Street, hedge funds, private equity. But you’re up there, too. … Is that the reason why you won’t say that you want to tax the rich?

Sherrill No.

TNJD No relation at all.

Sherrill No. I tell people that if you give money to my campaign, what that buys you is me calling you up and saying, ‘So sorry, I’m going to be voting against you guys on this one.’ I’m always for the people. When you come from a place of service like the military, you always know what your North Star is. … I’ve moved out of all individual stocks. We had them in a mutual fund. We didn’t trade in individual stocks. Because I didn’t want anyone to think that I’m engaging in self-dealing.

Buried in there is a really interesting idea. Because Congress has resisted creating a Canada-style single-payer health care system since at least the 1970s, some states have toyed with the idea of creating a statewide single-payer system. And, while Sherrill didn’t exactly say it, in order to do that the states would have to get a waiver to take all of the federal cash they get from Medicare, Medicaid, various other programs (including children’s health programs, etc.) and put it all into one pot, and then use that money to inaugurate a state health care program for that state’s citizens. Of course, such a system, if it’s really “single payer,” would have to sweep up private insurance and employer-sponsored health care insurance, too.

It’s exceedingly complicated: getting the waiver wouldn’t be easy, and creating a new system “from the ground up,” as Sherrill said, would be, well, a tall order. (Wonks can read this article in Health Affairs from 2019 to get a sense of how complicated it is.) Of course, Sherrill didn’t say if the new system would be single payer or based on avaricious private insurance companies. Still, it’s worth considering, it’s bold, and it ought to be kicked back and forth during the 2025 campaign in New Jersey.