Are you part of the 47 percent?
You might not matter to Mitt Romney.
“There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what,” Romney said. “All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it.”
He claimed that 47 percent of people don’t pay income taxes. That’s true. But a lot of times, that figure is misrepresented, and people start to believe that 47 percent of American households don’t pay any taxes at all. That’s not true at all.
His remarks were captured on a secret video filmed at a private fundraising dinner in Boca Raton in May.This dinner, by the way, cost about $50,000 a plate to attend.
That secret video of the event has been circulating around the Web for a few weeks. In fact, parts have been around since late May, according to a timeline put together by Ben Smith of BuzzFeed.
This week, Mother Jones posted more “snippets” of the video, which prompted Romney’s campaign to hold a press conference late Monday.
“By the way, whoever has released the snippets would, I would certainly appreciate if they would release the whole tape so we could see all of it,” Romney said.
Mother Jones talked to the video’s owner and released the entire 49-minute fundraiser speech Tuesday morning.
Romney’s first number might be accurate, but it draws too many conclusions for the public.
Although two-thirds of the 47 percent don’t pay income tax, they do pay payroll tax, according to an article on The Daily Beast by Kevin Fallon.
The other one-third of the 47 percent of Americans that Romney accused of already voting for President Barack Obama in the upcoming November elections are elderly or poor. These two demographics either earn nontaxable money from Social Security or don’t make enough money to be taxed. It also turns out that a lot of those people live in conservative states.
“Of the 10 states with the highest percentage of people who pay no income tax, nine are red states,” Fallon said.
While it’s tough to get the full context from a short clip, Mother Jones released the full video, so now we have the full context of what Romney was trying to say.
But he hasn’t backed down, and he hasn’t apologized to the 47 percent of Americans he has basically ostracized. He stands by what he said: The people who don’t pay income tax are the same people who will automatically vote for Obama.
Do you fall into that category of non-income-tax-paying individuals? Are you voting for Obama?
Romney thinks so, and he already wrote you off.
This debacle may not do much in the long run to the campaign. We’ll need to keep an eye on the ramifications, but there are only a few weeks until Election Day.
