Indeed. As a refugee, I doubt George Sr had bootstraps to pull up. Wasn’t it great that a safety net was there.
Public Service Announcement: “Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan” is an anagram of “My ultimate Ayn Rand porn.”
Yes, which is why I mentioned Pappy Romney, but not his descendants as polygamists.
NY Times article on Mitt Romney’s inheritance
Mitt’s father George died in 1995. By then Mitt was already quite wealthy. Though Mitt did inherit money from his father’s estate, he gave it to a scholarship fund at BYU.
Mitt did take a loan from his father to buy a house, though the article does not mention when that happened.
Whether George’s receiving government assistance years before benefited Mitt financially is a bit of a stretch IMHO.
Apparently, the Romney family benefited from a $100,000 refugee fund established by Congress.
http://articles.boston.com/2012-01-31/nation/31006143_1_mitt-romney-george-romney-romney-story
I guess this was the welfare relief.
Republicans are not opposed to a social safety net…they just don’t want it to become a hammock. I don’t see the big deal. The Right and Left are in agreement WRT a social safety net. They disagree in size and scope.
I’ll go with irrelevant on this. It’s not Mitt, it’s his father, before Mitt was born.
After this revelation, I will not be voting for George Romney for President. 
Yeah, after a couple of hours, I think this isn’t a big deal. It is a funny counterpoint to ‘We Built This.’
It isn’t a big deal, but it is still funny. And if we wanted a bootstrap puller we should’ve elected George.
Okay, if we didn’t want Nixon we should’ve elected George. Too bad a majority of us did. 
The way they want to cut programs you’d be hard pressed to get a banana hammock out of Mitt
I agree. If the GOP proposes that welfare be a “hand up, not a hand out” program, then George Romney is a perfect example of how temporary government help can get people through tough times to help them become successful on their own. Not a lifestyle.
To be fair, I don’t think George ever claimed he was some sort of Horatio Alger self-made man and would have found much of the anti-welfare rhetoric of recent times rather weird if not offensive.
The apple fell quite far from the tree.
It already ISN’T a lifestyle, there is no free lifetime money for being poor anymore. It’s all boogeymen right wing lies to vilify the poor as the source of the country’s problems while the thieving bankers are laughing all the way to…the bank.
Which is why I’ve joined the anti-immigration anti-welfare party!
Ron Paul isn’t.
Exactly. It’s the current crop I find to be ironic.
Hmmm… I wonder if there was a work requirement back then? If so, well, it demonstrates that government regulation of welfare recipients is necessary and produces a positive effect. And if not, well, it obviously means that work requirements aren’t necessary to move welfare recipients into successful futures. 