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Graham Platner: “Social Security wasn't a block grant. It wasn't a tax…”

Featuring: Graham Platner, Populist, Progressive | Former Candidate, U.S. Senate Maine

Graham Platner Speaks to PACKED Augusta Crowd

Published April 30, 2026 | Video Starts at 18:46

She took that philosophy and she welded it to the political will and power that FDR had built. And they brought us Social Security. And Social Security wasn't a block grant. It wasn't a tax credit. It wasn't playing around in the margins of an existing policy. They invented it out of whole cloth. They believed that a society that cannot take care of its elderly is no society at all. (18:46–18:52)

CLAIM

Asserts that Social Security was neither a block grant nor a tax credit.

This is an excerpt from a raw transcript. The assertions have not been audited or verified. Tap the video to view the source footage and understand the context.

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Graham Platner

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“Frances Perkins was the first woman cabinet member in American history.”
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“This nation electrified all of rural America in the 1930s in less than a decade.”
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“In 1944, FDR unveiled a second bill of rights, the Economic Bill of Rights.”
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“We have a political system that is entirely inaccessible to the average American.”
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“We are now coming into over a month of a war that nobody seems to want.”
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“This is a war that has been started because Donald Trump is in the Epstein files.”
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“This war has been started because Benjamin Netanyahu has been begging for it for things 30 years.”
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“This war is happening because it's good for the Saudi government and it's good for Raytheon executives.”
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“Every time a Tomahawk missile blows up a girls school, somebody makes an extra dollar.”
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“We have a political system in which if you have money, if you have power, you can see your needs represented in policy.”
Graham Platner Speaks to PACKED Augusta Crowd | Uploaded April 30, 2026 | 05:09-05:19
“If you work two or three jobs, if you struggle to make rent, you will never see what you need in the policy that comes out of this kind of…”
Graham Platner Speaks to PACKED Augusta Crowd | Uploaded April 30, 2026 | 05:20-05:30
“People my age and younger in the state [of Maine] can barely afford to buy a house.”
Graham Platner Speaks to PACKED Augusta Crowd | Uploaded April 30, 2026 | 12:21-12:26
“Today, my house has tripled in value, but my paycheck hasn't.”
Graham Platner Speaks to PACKED Augusta Crowd | Uploaded April 30, 2026 | 12:29-12:34
“The goods and services we need to live our lives go up in prices, and our wages remain stagnant.”
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“We have watched the largest transfer of wealth from the working class to the ruling class in the history of this country.”
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“They changed the tax code. They gutted the social safety nets that we built in the 1930s and 40s.”
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“The system that we live in, it isn't broken. It is functioning exactly as it was intended to.”
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“It was those programs that brought about in the 50s and 60s, a society that...had the smallest margin of wealth inequality we have ever had…”
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“We need to make all of that go away and we can with a universal health care system.”
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“We need a tax code that's going to tax wages at a lower rate than we tax wealth because right now we do the opposite.”
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“We need to remove the cap on Social Security contributions so we can fund Social Security forever and all time and expand benefits so…”
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“We need to put a ban on senators and congresspeople trading stocks and bonds because that's just corruption.”
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“We need a Senate and a Congress that is going to reassert its authority around war making.”
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“We need a new War Powers act that claws back all the power that Congress has abdicated for decades to the Executive.”
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“We have to get off fossil fuels, and we have to do it in a way that is not just going to prioritize corporate profits.”
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“We need industrial planning around our energy grid in this country.”
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“When we build it, it needs to be built with union labor.”
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“Everybody knows that this system is built to screw working people.”
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“It's billionaires, it's corporations, it's Wall Street, it's private equity, it's Silicon Valley as it manipulates our feelings and…”
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“We need to beat back the powers that have exploited and oppressed us all for generations.”
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“One junior senator from Maine is not going to be enough to change the tax code.”
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“It's why this country waged war on organized labor for the last 50 years.”
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“We need to get rid of the structural impediments that allowed [Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema] to do that in the first place. One of those…”
Graham Platner Speaks to PACKED Augusta Crowd | Uploaded April 30, 2026 | 37:20-37:30
“The filibuster has been used for a very long time as a weapon against policy that is good for the working class of this country.”
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“Returning to the speaking filibuster is, I think, going to be a necessity.”
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“If we didn't have the filibuster, then the Republicans might have passed the SAVE Act.”
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“We shouldn't vote to fund insanity like ICE or like these wars overseas.”
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“We need to cut funding for this stuff.”
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“We need to spend the next two years shutting down the White House because we subpoena every single person in it, every single day.”
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“We drag ICE agents in front of a Senate committee and make them take their masks off.”
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“We used the power of the Supreme Court, we used the power of the Senate to impose on the Supreme Court.”
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“Things like universal health care, things like overturning Citizens United, if we continue to treat this Supreme Court like a functional…”
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“This administration breaks the law every single day. It defies the Constitution every single day.”
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“Mitch McConnell is a very effective senator. He got a Supreme Court justice when he was in the minority.”
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“If we, the Senate, if it chose to, can exercise ethics oversight of the Supreme Court.”
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“We could hold Supreme Court justices to the same ethics standards that we hold all other federal judges.”
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“There is a compelling case for the impeachment and removal of at least two [Supreme Court justices].”
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“The Constitution is a living document. It was meant to be a living document.”
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“The first bill that I intend to work on in the Senate is a Senate companion bill to the one Jared Goldin put in in the House that got killed…”
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“We don't take corporate PAC money. I don't take money from special interest groups like fossil fuel companies or like apac.”
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“We take money from individual donors and packs that are affiliated with labor unions and other ideologically similar groups who are only…”
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“By the time this thing is done, we're going to need to have built something bigger than anyone has ever seen in the history of the state of…”
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