Everybody is talking about the leaked video of Romney talking about 47 percent who pay no income tax and feed at the government trough, while the hard working 53 percent support the rest of the country.
Even conservatives are slapping their heads. David Brooks writes,
Personally, I think he’s a kind, decent man who says stupid things because he is pretending to be something he is not — some sort of cartoonish government-hater. But it scarcely matters. He’s running a depressingly inept presidential campaign. Mr. Romney, your entitlement reform ideas are essential, but when will the incompetence stop?
We're all receiving some sort of a government benefit – Medicare or public education or safe streets. Our veterans use hospitals that mend them after the bodies have been ruined by war. We all have family members who have needed unemployment, due to this horrific economy.
I'm hesitant to say that Romney's statement is typical of the conservative point of view and that this endemic of widespread wrong thinking. Yes, there's this 53% website that I've checked out from time to time, but other than one or two wingnuts in a compound in Montana, nobody is ready to stop caring for the veterans, children, and the elderly.
Here's a nice chart from Klein about who pays income tax and who doesn't. 10 percent of those who don't pay income tax are the elderly. Stop your whining about eating cat food, old man, and pay us some money.
Did Romney just lose the election? Will this leaked video lead to a landslide win for Obama?
Romney is right about the fact that 47% will never vote for him, because partisanship is solidified in this country. But to paint the die-hard Democratic voters as the freeloaders vs. the hard-working Republicans is sloppy and stupid. He certainly offended even his base who are all getting help from government in one way or another. Were the offended enough to vote for the other guy? Will they decide to stay home on voting day?
UPDATE: I'm watching FOX and reading conservative blogs right now. I'm curious how they are responding to this gaffe. The NRO people aren't happy.
Oooh. Nice chart.
UPDATE2: David Frum writes:
So when a politician or a broadcaster talks about 47% in "dependency," the image that swims into many white voters' minds is not their mother in Florida, her Social Security untaxed, receiving Medicare benefits vastly greater than her lifetime tax contributions; it is not their uncle, laid off after 30 years and now too old to start over. No, the image that comes into mind is minorities on welfare.
Apt. 11d 
This chart makes no sense. It implies that there are no unemployed people or people who receive more through AFDC and their “SNAP cards” than they put into the system — unless you’re saying that they pay taxes on their welfare, which is just stupid. It’s impossible for twenty percent of the people in Arkansas to be on foodstamps and for there to only be 6 percent of Americans who only take money without paying in to the system.
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“It’s impossible for twenty percent of the people in Arkansas to be on foodstamps and for there to only be 6 percent of Americans who only take money without paying in to the system.”
Math isn’t my strong point, but even I can see that that statement can not be true. It depends on the relative size of Arkansas’ population to the rest of the population in the United States.
I don’t know the exact numbers, but as an example:
.2 x 100 (made-up population of Arkansas) = 20
.06 x 100,000 (made up population of US) = 6000
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Can’t you be on foodstamps and also pay payroll tax?
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yes. You can be working poor (and thus pay a payroll tax) and still be eligible for food stamps. 1 in 7 Americans now receive food stamps.
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A family of 4 earning around $30,000 (before payroll taxes) is eligible for food stamps. If all the deductions for housing, medical costs, and education are including, a family could earn $35,000 (an estimate) and still be eligible. http://www.fns.usda.gov/snap/applicant_recipients/eligibility.htm#income
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I don’t think this is it. Look, Todd Aiken is still ahead. A significant number of people think they don’t get any benefits from the government when they do: mortgage deductions, medicare, public school, etc. Frankly, I don’t underestimate the way Americans are clueless, sadly. But I do think this is a great talking point for Obama. Romney has always kind of acted like he’s too smart to be told what to do and now he is reaping the benefits of this behavior.
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I figure you guys will get a kick out of this: one of the debate topics my persuasive writing class chose this term is Obama v. Romney, and after meeting with the group working on it yesterday, I suspect most are pro-Obama (and at least 2 are losing their minds over women’s rights issues). So it may end up that I’ll have to argue for Romney in order to make sure they’re critically thinking.
I still haven’t crystallized quite what bugs me about Romeny’s statements. I think it’s less his overgeneralizing than the way he is stirring up resentment against poor people. And it bothers me that for the most part it works.
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This strikes me as more of a “rile up the base” sort of thing. This swings polls toward Romney by exactly the same amount as Obama lost Pennsylvania in 2008 for claiming that the people there were gun-clingers or something.
Also, that sort of chart at the bottom (Look! The 47% are all in the South!) doesn’t mean that they are Romney voters. In my experience, the true “freeloaders” (don’t work even though they can/ lazy/ good at gaming the system) are few and far between, but if you actually have one living on your block, he probably can converted 3 or 4 people to the Republican party just by being there.
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For over 25 years I have paid federal income tax. Last year I did not. I got earned income credit and got money back that I didn’t pay in. I felt totally weird about it, but I can tell you it kept us afloat through the summer.
My husband is one of the long-term unemployed. He has run out of benefits. So we take money out of retirement. We will pay taxes on that this year.
I work full-time, still pay in to Social Security. Even last year when I paid no federal tax, but did pay state taxes.
My kids get free lunch, my older daughters get Pell grants. Those are the sum total of our current benefits. Believe me, we appreciate them, we don’t expect them. We are not entitled in any way shape or form. There’s a lot more people like us then there are “welfare queens” living off such extravagances as food stamps.
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I am often speechless when my community college students show how angry they are about people who get welfare. So many of them are sure that most recipients are ripping off the system; numbers and graphs don’t seem to say much to them, but for some reason, in our area, Michelle Bachman does. And, I suspect, Romney does too.
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Our local news recently showed some footage of a lady checking to see if her SNAP card had been refilled — on her Iphone! You better believe a lot of people wondered how that was possible, me included.
There was also a famous picture which WaPo ran last year of a homeless guy taking a picture of Michelle Obama when she visited his homeless shelter — on his phone.
While it is possible that things like this are anomalies, there seem to be an awful lot of them. (Here in Norfolk there was recently a woman discovered to have been on the local government payroll for 24 years who never once showed up for work. Maybe there was only one of her, but it turned an awful lot of people off of government for a very long time around here.) It only takes one individual like that to make a lot of people think twice about how the government spends your money.
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“Our local news recently showed some footage of a lady checking to see if her SNAP card had been refilled — on her Iphone! You better believe a lot of people wondered how that was possible, me included.”
Oh my god! That’s horrible! I feel so … cheated. I never want to pay taxes again if it means some undeserving person has an iPhone.
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No, really, I am not sure what I’m supposed to feel when I read those stories. Am I supposed to feel betrayal? Disgust? Sadness? Fear?
Is apathy not an appropriate response? Does it mean I’m an immoral person if, even though I pay taxes and have pretty much never been a government employee (2 years p-t at the University of Maine), I don’t give a flying fig?
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Wendy, it’s the whole “they buy steak, pop and birthday cake” with their food stamps argument. If you’re poor, you are undeserving of any kind of celebration or treat, ever.
Frankly, it’s bullshit. Individuals here and there may abuse the system, but the majority of people need the aid they get.
For all you know, the iPhone was a gift and someone is paying the payments. Or maybe it’s a relic from a better time.
I have a huge iMac computer- it was bought three years ago when we still had money. Don’t judge someone’s entire story by a couple of extravagant (in your opinion) until you know the whole story.
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It’s just a play off of the old rhetoric of the deserving poor, who ought to be helped, versus the undeserving poor, who are all those cheats, sneaks, liars, laze-abouts and ne’er-do-wells.
Obviously, according to this interpretation, everyone who gets benefits who’s my friend or someone I like or is like me, well, they’re deserving of aid. Even more than that – they’re OWED this, whether because they personally paid in or whatever.
On the other hand, everyone that I don’t like or who’s not like me or who makes different choices? Well, clearly they are the undeserving rats who need to be kicked out the door and then all the rest of us (who’re just like me and totally deserve all we get!) will save bundles of money while the evil Others either reform their ways or die (quietly, off stage, pay for their own funerals).
Since I think that Apple sucks, I’ll be pushing for a policy that denies all government benefits, like education, health care, access to public services and the rest, to anyone who owns iStuff starting with my two feckless kids who swear that they can’t live without their iPod thingies. Why not? It’s about as rational an attitude as what I see here from Romney and the Tea Party types who’ve been spewing this exact rhetoric for the past year.
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I think that in addition to the “undeserving poor” (which, is, I agree with Janice, the same as “someone not like me”), Romney has no understanding of the finances of 99.9999% (or something like that of Americans).
I liked the white houses spokesman’s response that the President is the President of all Americans, even the ones who didn’t vote for him.
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I don’t even see the problem with the iPhone. If you owned one and lost a job, keeping it avoids the penalty for canceling a plan if you haven’t had it long and, regardless, you need a phone to look for work. I’d certainly cancel the land phone before the cordless.
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Not “cordless” but cell.
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I loathe Romney and have never voted Republican. I’ve lived happily in a blue state since college.
But I grew up in a red state. And I think we need to consider a different interpretation to the Moocher States map: when voting citizens see others, especially people close to them – their neighbors, their children – using government services instead of working, they are more likely to vote against candidates in favor of those social programs that (in their view) encourage that behavior. There are many people who badly need the safety net – but there are also people who behave irresponsibly – or at least are perceived to – because the safety net is there.
In my blue state, very few middle-class kids are getting pregnant out of wedlock or having children before they’ve gone through college. People on welfare (this is based on my work for a state agency, otherwise I would know NONE) are chronically ill or can’t speak the language or have no education and limited intellectual potential.
In my red home state, there are more white babies born out of wedlock than to married couples. People with middle class upbringings I graduated with are on disability but in bowling leagues. And this is who voters in those states see – not those who truly need the safety net.
We can’t solve this unless we understand.
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We can’t solve this unless we understand.
Understanding is pretty over-rated as far as solving political problems.
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So, Artemisia, it’s kind of like Robert Putnam’s conclusions about more diverse communities being less tolerant of diversity?
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But how does that explain why Romney was appealing to the wealthy donors in Bridgehampton using class resentment as a strategy? It would be one thing if he was going down to Mississippi and using this approach, but how does it work on the wealthy people in a blue state?
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I’ve always hated the “Moocher” state maps (I include the ones that show that divorce is most common in the “family values” states). Artemesia’s point is slightly different from mine, but might be related. States are just too broad a population to average, especially when diversity is high.
It’s interesting to show that divorce is higher in groups that espouse family values (though I suspect that’s not the empirical result, though there’s a possibility). But that’s not what the state level “moocher’ maps show.
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So what’s the scoop with Idaho on that map? Native American populations? White separatists living off government pensions & disability?
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I’ve always hated the “Moocher” state maps
Me also because it is so rare that anybody adjusts anything like that for age and I think that accounts for lots of the variation.
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Bj, low wages. We had many regions that no longer mine or log to the degree they once did, also corporations in Boise and elsewhere have scaled back or moved out entirely.
And really, we have no more white separatists than any other state. We just had some pretty visible crazies up North for a few years. Most of ’em are gone and have moved to Montana and Wyoming.
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The point of that map (which has been widely circulated) is to show that much of Romney’s base is receiving government benefits of some form and that his comment about people feeling entitled to benefits must have offended them.
Look, the economy sucks. All of us are either working too much or aren’t working as much as we would like. Much of America is either exhausted or depressed. That causes people to look at their neighbors with suspicion and bitterness. In my old neighborhood of contractors and teachers, I would see the guys out mowing their lawns at 4 and not see my tired hubby trudging down the block from the busstop for another 4 hours. Some days, not my best days, I would feel resentful. And they would look at me getting my kids to the busstop in my jogging pants and they would hate me for not going to work. They had no idea of everything I was doing after the school bus left. They would see my husband in his tie and his iPod and they would assume that we were rich bastards. Resentment and bitterness is not isolated in the South. It’s everywhere right now.
However, it’s irresponsible to use that bitterness and resentment, which is based on ignorance and hurt, and use it for political gain.
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It is also politically stupid to divide America in two groups of government moochers and hard workers, because nearly all of us are government moochers of one kind or another.
I’m hearing a lot of people question Romney’s IQ right now.
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I’m a hard worker when I have to be. Fortunately, it rarely comes up.
I’m not especially mad at the map, but it wouldn’t be that hard to make an adjustment to account for everybody going to Florida at 65 or the great hordes of 20-somethings moving into various cities.
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louisa,
When I lived in DC, I volunteered at Miriam’s Kitchen.(where that photo was taken.) It was run out of the basement of our church. Most of the men who came were veterans. Many with some form of post-tramatic mental illness. Every time I see an internet post disparaging that one man for the sin of owning a cell phone, I just want to cry. (it was taken over 3 years ago and people still bring it up for some reason.) If he is typical of the majority of the visitors to Miriam’s Kitchen, then he was a vet and fought for our country. I learned so much from the homeless vets during my time at Miriam’s Kitchen – a few were some of the wisest and kindest men I have ever met.
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”
The point of that map (which has been widely circulated) is to show that much of Romney’s base is receiving government benefits of some form and that his comment about people feeling entitled to benefits must have offended them. ”
But, the point is that the map doesn’t show that, at least without further analysis. The 45% of the people in Mississippi (a solidly “red” state) who don’t pay federal income tax don’t have to be the same people as the 55% who voted for McCain in 2008. It’s like the logic puzzle: some boys are tall, some boys are green. That doesn’t mean that boys are tall and green, or even that some boy are tall and green. They could be non-overlapping groups of people.
I’m not saying that *is* the explanation of the graphic — I’m guessing there are non-federal tax payers who vote for Republicans (and who may or may not be offended by his attitude). I think most people are pretty good at justifying why the aid they get is deserving or the taxes they pay are still too high (even when it’s nothing), though, so I’m guessing a fair number won’t be offended by being classified as the “47%.”
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And, yes, we are all moochers, because the government is running big deficits. Theoretically, it might seem impossible that everyone could be a moocher, but that theory doesn’t take deficit spending into account.
We pay a lot of taxes (noticing it especially right now, ’cause we’re filing our taxes for 2011 after an extension, like Romney is), and we don’t receive direct government benefits (mostly, no kids in public school, no one working for government), but we’re still mooching (roads, national parks, Smithsonian, tax deductions, safe streets, a safer world, . . . .).
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