The 47 Percent Gaffe
September 17, 2012 13 Comments
The latest media feeding frenzy is over a secret video of Romney gaffe’ing the biggest gaffe in the history of gaffery, reciting the line about how 47% don’t pay taxes etc yawn.
This is a good case study in young-lefty-pundit hackery for the following reason: there is absolutely nothing new, newsworthy, interesting, or earth-shattering about the 47% meme**. Lefty journolists may shriek in horror at the gauchery of it all but the fact is that concern over the possible development (and size increase) of a class of net-receivers is a true staple of righty politics. It has been around for years if not decades. It has especially cranked into high gear during the Obama years.
These facts are well-known and patently obvious to anyone with a passing familiarity with righty discourse and thinking. So upon seeing these hysterics from some lefty pundit getting the vapors, we are left with two options:
1. He has no familiarity with righty thinking whatsoever, thus is commenting on things he knows diddly-squat about.
2. He knows very well that this concern forms the backbone of righty fiscal thinking, but has decided to feign ignorance so he can play it up for maximal gaffe effectiveness. Meaning, he’s a cheerleader hack.
I really can’t think of a plausible third option.
The other juicy point to gnaw on here is that the lefty journalist corps is now busily writing up their pieces for people to read tomorrow whose premise is going to be that when Romney asserted such and such number of people receive more than they pay from Daddy Government, he was insulting those people. But where’s the insult? one is tempted to ask innocently. So what if some people make use of popular progressive programs? Isn’t that good?
Anytime one gets ‘progressives’ to unanimously (if backhandedly) acknowledge there is shame involved in government assistance, right-minded people have got to consider it a win.
**I suppose it’s possible that some of these leftopundits are aware of all of the above but that what actually bothers them is the “47%” number specifically. Like, they think it’s “really” 46% or 42.5% or whatever and are incensed he’d say 47. As if the specific number is what matters. This seems such a silly nit to pick that I had discounted it, but on second thought in this age of spreadsheet-armed youngsters having somewhere gotten the idea that autism-level “fact-checking” alone is what constitutes good journalism, you never know. But if that’s the basis for all the hyperventilating, shouldn’t they just be calling him a “liar” instead of painting it as an insulting gaffe? Would the gaffe content have gone away had he stated the ‘correct’ number whatever it is?
They don’t like that meme because it’s true that about half the country doesn’t pay income taxes. Certainly that’s not the same as not paying any taxes of any kind, but the things that righties cling to that lefties hate the most (in my experience) are ones mostly connected to accurate facts about a situation.
They know the number is, well, ‘about half’ and you can’t really claim IRS data is ‘right-wing’, so it’s a source of lefty irritation that righties cling to this reality of tax demographics in America because it is pretty major to realize about half the country pays no income taxes when there’s the whole lefty spiel about how rich people don’t pay their ‘fair share’. Normal people will (and are) like ‘uh, so what’s a fair share for those paying 0 or less (net tax receipients via credits)?’
And lefties, in my experience when that perfectly normal question is asked start frothing and sputtering. It’s pretty cute to watch.
The only real error of the 47% meme is that it includes retired people, who presumably have paid their taxes and really shouldn’t be classed with the net takers that the statistic is intended to refer to.
As for the why of it all, I think it’s because there is just under 6 weeks to go and it’s time for the full court press to get Obama reelected. They can finally drop the pretense of impartiality.
Well, but then again, some ‘retired’ people are now taking far more out than they ever put into SS. Or does that ‘not count’ because such-and-such return on SS is one’s baseline assumption? But why is that one’s baseline assumption, how do you defend it?
A lot depends on what the assumptions/definitions are here.
That said, I’m sure the calculation behind “47%” has technical problems and is easy to misunderstand. I’m also sure – a point I’ve also seen made – he also verbally conflates ‘taxes’ and ‘federal income taxes’ in a way that is technically incorrect. These things are so not the point though.
I mean, if leftopundits are accusing Romney of not rolling up his sleeves and building a spreadsheet with tabs for the tax code, welfare rolls, social security/medicare, sales taxes, property taxes, state/local taxes, etc., to get to a True And Correct maker/taker cutoff number, I am 100% sure he is guilty as charged. I believe the “47 percent” is just repeated from some think-tank study or some such and Romney failed to state all the assumptions and caveats behind it.
But…yawn. So what?
The point being made is not about the exact number it’s about the balance of a democracy between those who are recipients and those who aren’t. This is something conservatives routinely worry about, practically by definition. It is absolutely not new on the righty radar screen. So leftopundits reacting as if it’s a bad/wrong thing to worry about are essentially saying that righty political views are invalid and must be banished from the public sphere.
Now, there’s one other tack some of them could be taking, which is to *deny* that the ‘takers’ have recently increased in any way and thus deny that it’s anything resembling a growing problem. Maybe that’s what all the pundits think? But if so, they have utterly neglected to make that case.
yawn.
Increasing numbers of elderly who receive more in benefits than they ever paid in is a problem, but it’s a demographic issue rather than what I take the ‘half of the country doesn’t pay taxes’ meme to refer to. The problem with large numbers of people not paying into the system is that it creates moral hazard and they have no real reason not to vote for the guy who promises goodies without end. The subtext which everyone is afraid to say is that these people shouldn’t be allowed to vote at all. Our ancestors might have been onto something when they restricted the vote. But the elderly are not a part of this, because they worked and paid and don’t now because they are retired, not because they are lazy bums. For the same reason, no one counts children in this statistic.
I’ve heard the ‘they pay other taxes’ rejoinder, but I find it unconvincing. The income tax payers pay all these other taxes as well, so we’re still left with a major tax–arguably the major tax–that only a certain, shrinking portion of the country is paying. It’s not like I get a reprieve from payroll taxes and sales taxes because I pay income taxes.
“So leftopundits reacting as if it’s a bad/wrong thing to worry about are essentially saying that righty political views are invalid and must be banished from the public sphere.”
Well, yeah. What, you were expecting something else? Peel the veneer of impartiality back and the media becomes largely a democratic party organ.
I tend to disagree that the ‘longevity-sweepstakes-winner’ SS recipients are not part of the problem that Romney/righties worry about. We don’t have to think they are ‘lazy’ in order to think it’s a problem that they take out way more than they ever paid in. i.e., objectively, that is an actuarial problem, and it’s important to discuss what to do about it (no, I do not suggest taking away their vote
), whether we assign any moral blame to them or not (I don’t). The follow-on electoral analysis that anyone in that camp has an incentive to vote for Whoever Promises To Keep It Flowing is also totally fair – again, this doesn’t have to be some sort of moral condemnation.
The lefties do have a point in citing other taxes. For example, however much the fed income tax code is progressive to the point of having (practically) zero incidence on a huge # of people, you can point to things like SS taxes (regressive) and the mortgage-interest tax credit (benefits disproportionately go upper-class). Sales taxes will also tend to have a ‘regressive’ feel, at least on a utility level, simply because they take a much bigger chunk of lower-income folks’ paychecks. And of course there is the much-discussed issue of the capital-gains tax rate being lower than top income tax rates.
Anyway, the bottom line is that the full story of distributional impacts of all the various cornucopia of government programs and taxes is simply not a story one can possibly ‘accurately’ tell in a sentence or two without ‘lying’. But if we hold candidates to such a standard then standard righty political rhetoric is impossible to convey – which may, of course, be the point.
Now if lefties genuinely dispute the point that a large % of people have no stake in (reductions in) government taxation because they are perennial net-gainers, I wish they’d say that and make that case. If they are disputing that this asymmetry between payers and takers has increased recently, I wish they’d say *that* and make *that* case.
Instead what we get are these nit picky shallow debunkings of the 47 percent number, dwelling on the tax/fed income tax distinction, and so on, none of which comes even come close to the core of the payers/takers issue that righties are concerned about. This smells like such folks are trying to muddy the waters which makes me think that deep down, they concede the underlying point.
Well, of course they concede the underlying point. They just don’t like the underlying point.
It’s only 8 percent of the population that doesn’t pay either payroll tax or income tax. As you point out, these are mostly elderly people without jobs, and who may receive Social Security, which both major parties have an interest in keeping free from being taxed as income, and also include Veterans on disability. Interestingly, Mitt Romney likely falls into this 8 percent, since he does not claim any income other than capital gains, which is as we know taxed a disproportionate rate from regular income.
Sorry, I meant to say it’s 18 percent not 8 percent.
I don’t know if you can really separate out the moral dimension. Romney doesn’t. At the end of the day, either it is a bad thing that people are not invested in the system by paying taxes or it is not a bad thing, and if it isn’t a bad thing then what’s the beef? If it is a bad thing, then who’s doing the bad thing? Republicans should get their critiques straight, because there are several morals you could pull out of this story.
Yes, the working poor will pay other taxes, but I was saying that everyone who pays income taxes is also paying these other taxes. The story is that there is a significant part of the tax burden (income taxes) that is being shouldered by a shrinking part of the population. But that is too long for a bumper sticker or a soundbite, so it is simplified down to “47% don’t pay taxes”. The frustrating thing is that payroll taxes et al are often described as regressive–apparently for no other reason than that poor people also have to pay them. So, for the lefties, changing things so that poor people don’t pay any taxes is actually a goal of theirs, but they still harp on the tax types as though it meant something for their position.
I think the lefties, though, don’t really care about the issue and are just shilling for votes. For lefties, it would be perfectly fine if the top 10% or whatever paid all the taxes and everyone else just collected. However, if you actually say that in public, you kinda sound like a lunatic, so they have to dog whistle it instead.
Payroll taxes are regressive if only by virtue of the cap. Of course, traditionally (and ironically) lefties are the ones who want this particular tax to be regressive ‘because otherwise the support for SS would go away’, i.e. they’re afraid people would recognize it as a socialist program.
Sure we can separate the moral dimension in these discussions. One can think (and this is ALWAYS how I have seen the concern stated in righty circles) that it’s a Bad Development For Democratic Society if the government gets too ‘lopsided’, however that’s defined, in how its funders/recipients are balanced. At the same time, this need not be any individual’s ‘fault’ and one can acknowledge that the individuals in question are each acting in more or less rational, defensible ways.
For example: hyper-longevity is a problem – objectively – for Social Security. There are people now collecting SS checks who have already gotten back some multiple of what they (or their long-dead husband, in some cases) ever paid in as ‘payroll taxes’. This is a problem and so it’s worth worrying about and discussing. But are any of those people merit *blame* for collecting those checks? Of course not!
Admittedly, I don’t know if Romney ‘separates out the moral dimension’ in this way as I can’t read his mind and the ‘gaffe’ comments don’t really admit of such an in-depth analysis. What I am saying is that one *need not* automatically interpret this ‘lopsided’ concern to be a moral condemnation of The 47 Percent.
It is true that lefties muddy the waters a lot with regard to how they use different tax types in different arguments. The problem conservatives face is sort of the opposite, they would rather taxes be simple to discuss but the way the code actually works, they end up oversimplifying. The actual tax situation is so complicated that any simple, concrete statement you make can be assaulted as a ‘lie’ or a ‘gaffe’.
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