Maine Democrat Graham "Nazi Tattoo" Platner is officially out of the race to unseat Senator Susan Collins (R-ME), and most rational people are hoping that he won't let a certain screen door hit him in a certain area on his way out of Maine politics. After all that's come to light about him, one would think that his political career was well and truly hooped, but he does have that great "Get Out of Jail Free" card - a "D" after his name - so who knows?
Meanwhile, the scramble is on to see who will replace the odious Platner as the Democrat's standard-bearer in this race. One name that's been mentioned is former Maine Senate President and "progressive" Tony Jackson, who calls for higher taxes at every turn. Jackson's fond of repeating the old Democrat horse squeeze about the "rich paying their fair share," but there's just one problem: It looks like Jackson isn't paying his fair share.
Jackson launched a bid for governor in 2025, and his campaign featured a large swath of ideas and issues that have become common on the Democratic left, especially on the issue of taxation. So Jackson had a plan. Naturally, he called it his "fair share" plan because one of the more humorous aspects of Democratic tax plans is the accusation that wealthy taxpayers don't pay their "fair share," when it fact, they pay more taxes than all other income groups combined.
The plan included all the usual delights, such as a higher top state income tax rate, a surcharge on millionaires, higher corporate taxes, and the repeal of a 2011 tax cut package.
This would be all well and good except that it took a state lien to get Jackson to pay his fair share of taxes. In August of 2025, the state hit Jackson with a lien related to unpaid state income taxes from 2020.
The total amount owed? $4,635.04. Oops.
Isn't that always the way with the left? Rules for thee, not for me. - and visible shenanigans, like Democrat Rep. Ilham Omar (MN-05) and her husband, whose net worth varies by millions of dollars, seemingly from day to day. Well, that doesn't apply to Jackson, granted; all he did, apparently, was to not pay his fair share of taxes.
In October, the lien was released by the state. It didn't indicate why, but since Jackson was in the middle of a campaign advocating for raising taxes, it's reasonable to conclude that he paid the tab for that reason. After all, it's hard to advocate that people pay more taxes when you have thousands sitting out there unpaid.
The only operative question is, "Why didn't he pay when the bill was due in 2020?"
Because he didn't want to.
Jackson has evidently paid the back taxes, but that's a good question. Why didn't he pay them in 2020?
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Tony Jackson's stated positions are the predictable leftist claptrap, not the least of which is the corral litter about the "rich paying their fair share." In income taxes especially, the "rich" pay far more than their fair share; in 2023, the last year for which final records are available, the top 10 percent of income earners paid over 70 percent of the total income tax revenue at the federal level. These people are paying far more than their "fair share," and Jackson (and almost all Democrats) want to bleed them for more.
He wants this so much that he apparently was even willing to settle his own tax tab to have a shot at it. But that doesn't make him any less of a hypocrite.
Somewhere, Senator Collins is hearing about this and smiling.
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