Opinion: Romney's 47% Don't Pay Taxes Remark Shows He's Exactly Who We Thought He Was
To paraphrase the former Arizona Cardinals head coach Dennis Green: "Mitt Romney is who we thought he was."
The recently released tape of Romney speaking to donors at a closed door fundraiser has exposed Mitt Romney to, in fact, be the person Democrats have portrayed him to be: a rich, out of touch, arrogant man that has no respect or connection to the American middle class and absolutely no interest in making the American middle class stronger.
Romney does not like the moochers that don't pay income taxes and, by extension, is no fan of the two biggest reasons wage earners with low annual incomes pay payroll taxes but not federal income taxes: the earned income tax credit and the child tax credit.
Thanks to this tape, we can start to piece together Romney's economic plan: eliminate tax breaks that reduce the tax burden of middle class families.
All along, Romney's tax numbers never added up. How he would recover the tremendous cost of his cuts, skewed to the highest income earners, has been a question Romney and Ryan refuse to address.
But now we have the answer.
In Romney's own words he believes that these tax credits create a culture of dependency on the government and cause people to fail to take responsibility for their lives.
So Romney will lower the tax rates for the wealthiest Americans and eliminate deductions like the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit.
But to make his budget math work he will also have to eliminate the tax credit for mortgages, for health care, for local and state taxes, for student loan interest and for charitable deductions.
All the deductions the moochers in our society adore.
And to really get the full participation of society in the federal income tax he can put the screws to our military and to our seniors by taxing Social Security and Medicare benefits.
So middle class moochers there goes your child tax credit, your home mortgage interest deduction, your credit for state and local taxes and all the other freebies.
There is no other way to complete the picture Romney has sketched out than to eliminate all of those deductions.
And he thinks he is doing the middle class a favor. That they will get of their lazy butts and earn more or take another minimum wage job.
There is a reason Mitt Romney is down 22 points in Massachusetts polling, the state he once governed. In a year where a Republican incumbent senator is in a neck and neck race, Romney is not even considered an option.
Why?
Because they know him. They lived through his four years of gross mismanagement of the state and they lived through the massive fee increases that Romney imposed on people to keep taxes lower.
It is amazing how far the Republican Party has moved to the rightwing fringe in just four years.
While I disagreed with a lot of what John McCain proposed, he was a patriot.
Mitt Romney clearly is not. He banks overseas and ridicules our citizens.
Romney is driven strictly by ambition and has no clue how this country works.
He has now made clear that he believes that too few Americans pay income taxes – a difficult position for an alleged tax cutting Republican to take.
Democrats have repeatedly said that Mitt Romney's goal is to increase the tax burden on working families and cut taxes for the richest Americans.
It is impossible for Romney to push back on that argument now.
You would think that Mitt Romney, the son of a father who relied on government aid in his youth, would know better. But he does not.
And in the private rooms where he raises vast sums of money from people like him, they disparage working people while waiters and waitresses in the room clear their tables and refill their wine glasses.
About Bill Buck
Bill Buck is a Democratic strategist, President of the Buck Communications Group, a media relations and new media strategies consulting business based in Washington, DC, and Managing Director of the online ad firm Influence DSP. He has over twenty years of international and national communications experience. The views and opinions expressed in this post are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of CBS Local.
