The woman who made the mittens worn by Sen. Bernie Sanders in a viral meme says she no longer sells those mittens due to high taxes placed on her business.
“People have been contacting me thinking that they can get mittens, and actually, they can’t,” Vermont school teacher Jen Ellis said about the mittens that Sanders wore on Inauguration Day, adding that high taxes drove her out of business.
“I don’t have any more, and I don’t have much of a mitten business anymore because it really wasn’t worth it,” she continued. “Independent crafters get really taken for a ride by the federal government. We get taxed to the nth degree, and it wasn’t really worth it pursuing that as a business, even as a side hustle.”
Still, despite Sanders’s strident support for raising taxes, including on the middle class, to pay for “Medicare for all,” Ellis says she supports the senator.
“I’m also super pro-Bernie and as a public school teacher, I can see every day how families are struggling,” she said. “People are just trying to make ends meet, and they need things like student loan forgiveness and free education and a lot of the things that Bernie is fighting for.”