The left was apparently shocked and horrified to hear Mitt Romney speak about the 47% of American households that don't pay federal income tax. A "fact-checker" for CBS News, Lucy Madison, referred to his remarks as "inflammatory," but had to admit that according to the Tax Policy Center 46.4% of American households paid no federal income tax in 2011. Right-wingers already knew this.
Miz Madison did what every Obamaton always does, immediately change the subject to payroll taxes. Payroll taxes are an earner's contribution to the Social Security and Medicare benefits they will eventually obtain. As such, they are supposed to be kept separate from the tax revenue that supports the operating budget of the federal government.
Our representatives do surreptitiously move these monies around, basically stealing from Peter Dot-Gov to pay Paul Dot-Gov, but that doesn't change the fact that payroll taxes make no significant contribution to the upkeep of all the many programs, agencies and departments of the burgeoning bureaucracy to which the left is so devoted. They don't help pay for the new soccer field at Gitmo ($750,000), the USAID's version of "Sesame Street" for Pakistani television ($10 million), the NIH study of "hookah smoking habits in Jordan ($55,382) or U.S. foreign aid to China ($17.8 million in 2011).
Yes, we send foreign aid to China.
Before we get any further afield than China, let's go back and look at the rest of Gov. Romney's remarks.
.... I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means. -- I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. In my youth I travelled much, and I observed in different countries, that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer. There is no country in the world where so many provisions are established for them; so many hospitals to receive them when they are sick or lame, founded and maintained by voluntary charities; so many alms-houses for the aged of both sexes, together with a solemn general law made by the rich to subject their estates to a heavy tax for the support of the poor. Under all these obligations, are our poor modest, humble, and thankful; and do they use their best endeavours to maintain themselves, and lighten our shoulders of this burthen? -- On the contrary, I affirm that there is no country in the world in which the poor are more idle, dissolute, drunken, and insolent..."
Omigosh, will ya look at that. That's not Romney's speech at some fundraiser; that's Benjamin Franklin, one of our most beloved founding fathers, opining on the "Management of the Poor" (The London Chronicle, November 29, 1766).
But I guess it does have something to do with paying taxes.
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