Mitt On Moochers

Mother Jones’ David Corn has published a video of Mitt Romney making pretty disdainful remarks about the perceived Obama electorate at a private Boca Raton fund-raiser from earlier this year:

There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what…These are people who pay no income tax.

I’d like to address that 47 percent figure. You may remember that in response to the Occupy movement, a conservative meme emerged that went like this: Nearly half of Americans — 47 percent — do not pay income taxes. The figure is correct but also misleading, as you can see in this chart from the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center (flagged by Matt Yglesias).

The chart shows that the bulk of the people who pay no federal income tax — because they are simply too poor — pay other taxes on what they earn (namely the payroll tax). The other chunk of that 47 percent is mostly comprised of the elderly, a notoriously jobless gang of swindlers. So when Mitt Romney castigates this 47 percent — these undesirable moochers — he’s really talking about a bunch of old people and the very, very poor.

And as Ezra Klein illustrates, Republicans bear the responsibility for scotching many Americans’ income-tax liability:

…when you look at graphs of the percent of Americans who don’t pay income taxes, you see huge jumps after Ronald Reagan’s 1986 tax reform and George W. Bush’s 2001 and 2003 tax cuts. So whenever you hear that half of Americans don’t pay federal income taxes, remember: Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush helped build that.

Make no mistake though, Romney’s plutocratic diatribe was no gaffe. In fact, his campaign has largely doubled down on his statement (which is seemingly now the best way to tell if it’s really a bad error). This is how Romney truly feels — that a parasitic section of the population (also known as the self-pitying Obama electorate) is dragging down the hardworking and deserving elite. In true trickle-down form, candidate Romney insists that tax cuts for the rich will ultimately help everybody. But a more candid Mitt Romney sees this 47 percent more like a helplessly lazy and entitled — yet politically enduring — opponent. Jonathan Chait:

He believes that market incomes in the United States are a perfect reflection of merit. Far from seeing his own privileged upbringing as the private-school educated son of an auto executive-turned-governor as an obvious refutation of that belief, Romney cites his own life, preposterously, as a confirmation of it. (“I have inherited nothing. Everything I earned I earned the old fashioned way.”)

The Mitt Romney that has been out on the campaign trail up until now had a certain unnerving phoniness about him that made a lot of people on both sides of the aisle think he’s just not presidential material. That said, this Mitt Romney — the real Mitt Romney — is a much scarier dude.