Ok I’ve read a lot of newstories on this and not one has explained why it was such a big deal, the comment was not far from the truth and was not so outlandishly outrageous(like saying hey lets use poor kids for food!).
Why was this seen as a massive blunder?
Since this is a political question, let’s move it over to Great Debates.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
He was saying he would only be President to half the country. The 47% were beneath him as citizens.
He called 47% of the country moochers. You don’t see the problem in that?
His argument was that 47% of the U.S population doesn’t pay taxes and thus, will vote for Obama (presumbly because they are shiftless, layabouts who are only attracted to Obama because he’s a socialist).
Romney then went on to say that because these voters are going to go vote Obama no matter what, they don’t matter to him.
I’m curious: Why would you need anyone to explain why this is a big deal? If you know what he said, then it should obvious. Not paying income taxes is not synonymous with being a freeloader and it’s not synonymous with being an Obama voter. And any politician who writes off a huge block of the populace as a lost cause, in a public forum, is an incompetent politician.
It’s been pretty clear that this is a common sentiment around Republican circles, but rarely will a politician voice it. Essentially, he’s saying that the half of the country who are too poor and marginalized to be able to pay income taxes are useless leeches who refuse to take personal responsibility for their lives.
Of course this actually does accurately describe some percentage of the populace, but it’s nowhere near half. There are simply a whole lot of people working shit jobs and getting nowhere in life, having so little money that they don’t hit the levels of income that would require you to pay income tax (but they do generally pay payroll taxes). If you’re working hard just to keep your head above water, and you’re lumped in with people who are legitimately leeches and irresponsible, it’s obviously insulting.
Moreover, it just played into the image that Romney was a rich elitist, who ran a company that sometimes dismantled the very companies that perhaps these people who are too poor to pay income tax used to work for.
It’s not as if these comments were so shocking that Obama won an 80-20 victory. Even if it only soured 1 or 2 percent of people on Romney, that’s a significant electoral shift when the races come down to a few percent. You might think most of the poor people are the sorts who’d vote for Obama anyway, but that’s not true - lots of poor people, especially in the south, are staunchly republican. Often quite bizarrely, against their self interests. In fact, some of the most fervent apologists I’ve seen for why we should cripple the lower classes before we dare impede or tax the super rich in any way have been extremely poor people.
This article contains the text of the statement:
Because it was:
(a) False. There may be 47% of the country on government assistance of some sort and 47% that don’t pay incomes taxes, but they are not the same people (and the numbers are off anyways).
(b) Tone-deaf. A person as rich as Romney, talking to other rich people about how put upon they are by folks too poor to pay taxes is unseemly.
(c) Insulting to large segments of the population that he needed votes from (including but not limited to old people on SS and Medicare).
(d) Divisive by attempting to split the country into “producers” and “takers”. Nobody is all one or the other, and many people are one for part of their life and the other for another part. That’s sort of the point of a safety net - to catch those that fall so they can move back up.
Just for the record, here is the most pertinent part of the transccript:
He conflated two numbers:
47% of Americans don’t pay federal income tax
~50% of Americans typically vote for the Democratic party
He started out complaining about the 47% as if he’d never convince them to vote Republican, while completely ignoring the fact that a substantial portion of that 47% already votes Republican. And, for that matter, a substantial portion of the 53% votes Democrat.
As someone who’s been in both the 47% (when I was active duty Air Force, no less) and the 53%, I found his generalization that everyone who doesn’t pay federal income taxes to be both a freeloading deadbeat and a liberal to be both completely wrong and rather insulting.
Even before the 47% remark Romney had the reputation for being one of the financial elite who didn’t understand or care about the common man. Since most of the electorate identifies more with the common man than the rich elite, this was a problem.
In the 47% comment he insulted nearly half of the country and said that he “wasn’t going to worry” about these people cemented this reputation in place. Even though from context it was clear he was talking about campaign strategy it was heard by many people as a policy statement, that he would be president only for the better off half of the country, and wouldn’t care if people in the lower income brackets suffered.
I’m amused by how “federal income taxes” is the very specific benchmark in play. I’ve asked people who tout this as a national divide how they feel about people who pay sales taxes, payroll taxes, gasoline taxes, school and property taxes… and nope, their arguments always come back to who pays “federal income taxes”, as if it was Captain America’s shield or something.
It’s a classic example of letting specificity lie on your behalf, the only price being that you dare not vary from the script. I did not run over any girl scouts yesterday in my Toyota Camry… I did not run over any girl scouts yesterday in my Toyota Camry… I did not run over any girl scouts yesterday in my Toyota Camry…
It doesn’t matter whether I see a problem in it because I was never going to vote for him anyway, in republican circles I’ve seen that 47% number bandied about with wide applause and it seems like that is the audience.
I guess what I’m saying is it seems like the 47% comment was something so totally outrageous even Romney’s base would reject it, but it wasn’t it was just republican propaganda that was on everyone’s lips.
He said he doesn’t care about 47 percent. That’s true. He doesn’t care about 47 percent of the population. But he said it out loud. It is callous and stupid at the same time. He claimed to care a whole lot about poor people and that he was really smart and going to help them. Not true. He doesn’t give a shit about poor people and he isn’t going to help them, and he’s dumb enough not to keep his mouth shut about it.
It was pretty clear from the context of the video he was saying the 47% would never have republican ideals anyway, so he was saying no matter what he does those people will never vote for him/vote republican.
Another point that I never saw brought up: While he was putting down and writing off almost half the country, he and his fellow Republicans were doing everything they could to get their tax bill as close to zero as possible.
He didn’t learn anything even after the election was over. In a conference call with donors, he said:
Isn’t your Camry in the shop and aren’t you driving your Toyota 4Runner. Are you using it 4 running over girl scouts? Besides, aren’t Girl Scouts all about teaching about contraception and a bunch of liberals anyway?
It wasn’t a big deal in that I highly doubt it cost him the election or anything, but it galvanized opposition to Romney. It was something people could point to and declare: this attitude is what we are against, this is who the Republicans are.
As for this arguement, it’s obvious in context Romney was was talking about “worrying” about their votes, that he’d never be able to win them over:
His remarks were stupid and offensive enough on their own merits without being exaggerated.
It’s a basic rule of using a group of people as a scape goat: Make sure that group of people is small. When it gets to be more than about 30% of the population, you need to ask whether the scape goating is going to get you more votes from the in group than you are going to lose from the out group.
Besides, poor people have gotten tired of being told that they’re the authors of their own misfortune, even the ones who actually are.
Let’s not forget that the other taxes you mention are almost always regressive, and represent a lower percentage of income the richer you get, income taxes are the only progressive taxes in the mix.