Joshua Holland at Alternet has a thoughtful piece on the intellectual fudging behind Romney’s “47%” who allegedly don’t pay taxes, don’t have skin in the game, and feel both entitled and victimized.
This notion of a non-paying half of the population omits a fact that the right usually understands – that these sorts of figures are not set in stone.
47% is a figure that represents mobile segments of the population.
That is, the people who are in the non-paying 47% in one year are in the paying 53% in the next.
For instance, included in the non-payers are students, who eventually do pay taxes.
Furthermore, there are plenty of wealthy households that don’t pay taxes.
In fact, if Romney wants to find entitled people who cry victim at the drop of a hat, feel the government owes them bail-outs, contribute nothing and steal whatever isn’t actually nailed down, maybe he should check out some of his colleagues in the financial industry.
Joshua Holland writes:
“More than a fifth of households that pay no federal income taxes are elderly. This is a group that should feel entitled. They paid into Social Security and Medicare during their working years, and are now in retirement. Many are struggling to get by .
There are a good number of rich people among the 47 percent of households that pay no federal income taxes. According to the Tax Policy Center, 18,000 households with incomes over $500,000 – and 4,000 households bringing in over $1 million – paid no federal income taxes in 2011.
Because there is no discrete group of Americans who routinely pay no income taxes year in and year out, it’s impossible to say for sure what their partisan loyalties might be, but it’s highly likely that a majority of them are Republicans. Around four out of 10 of those households are divided between demographics that lean towards the Dems – students, the poor – and those that lean toward the Republicans – the elderly, disabled veterans. But a majority of that group – six in 10 – are just lower income working families whose incomes fell below a certain threshhold in a given year. And this is where they live:
The Romney campaign is reportedly going to run with this narrative in the coming weeks. The problem is that it only resonates with a minority of hard-right voters who aren’t up for grabs anyway. Most Americans understand that half the country isn’t indolent and doesn’t see themselves of victims of anything but the depression in which we find ourselves today. And that’s why, according to a Gallup poll released on Wednesday , only 20 percent of registered voters say that Romney’s sneering remarks make them more likely to vote for him, while 36 percent say they’re turned of by them.”
The delusional nature of Romney’s math is matched by the delusional nature of his philosophy.
He was born with no silver spoon, he claims, except the silver spoon of being born in America.
Well, being born in America is surely an enormous advantage.
But consider what Mr. Romney does NOT consider a silver spoon:
“Romney was the son of a governor and an auto executive who gave him a wealth of connections, a private education, college tuition, a stock portfolio that he lived on while in graduate school, help buying a first house.”
Apparently, Romney thinks that had he been born Hispanic, his life would have been much easier.
Oh boo-hoo.
Last I looked, the financial industry, not noticeably underpaid, was filled with while males who are NOT Hispanic.
And their high incomes seem to have reflected no great competence on their part.
Indeed, the high incomes seem to have gone hand-in-hand with extraordinary levels of incompetence and criminality.