Romney's Tortured View of Money, Logic, and What it Means to Pay Taxes

Links to the complete video of Mitt Romney's May 17th "47%" remarks were released along with a transcript and if you wade through the remarks, they raise all sorts of interesting questions.


The comment that got him in the most trouble was the 47% Mitt Romney will "never care about":

47% of Americans pay no income taxes. So our message of low taxes doesn't connect... And so my job is not to worry about those people. I'll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for for their lives. 

Wow. So if you don't pay federal income taxes, you are not taking personal responsibility or caring for your life?

The most interesting question is why he didn't disown his remarks immediately after they were made public. Not Mitt.  He seemed to endorse them, quibbling only that they were not elegantly expressed.   Not elegantly stating something is when you call your friend fat instead of "heavyset" or "stocky." Either way, you are still saying they are heavy.
Mitt just called 47% of the country dependent on the federal government (which is silly) and therefore (as night follows day) pro-Obama. I am not sure how he could have stated that more elegantly. The idea was rude (and baseless) not its expression.  (For the record, I neither depend on government aid, pay zero federal taxes (I pay a higher rate than Romney), but I do support President Obama.)
The issue is not that the video was put out there or even that it was taken but that Mitt Romney, a candidate for president of 100% of the people, actually said these things about 47% of the people he would like to represent. Instead of admitting that we got him and he really doesn't think those things (the "I was lying to a bunch of people to get $10,000 a plate from them" defense) he doubled down and essentially endorsed the idea, quibbling only about the elegance of its expression.

Romney has a very strange view of money. On one hand, he believes that his father's money played no role in defining him. His father's wealth and political connections had nothing to do with his wealth and political connections. (Why, he might even be better off if he were Mexican!)
On the other hand, if someone is poor,disabled, unemployed, or leaves the workforce to care for an elderly parent, the absence of taxable income automatically makes that person irresponsible and not caring for themselves.
So, to review, high family income has no effect on individual worth (meaning any financial success must come from some other factor, such as talent for hard work).  Low or modest family income, however, automatically means the person is irresponsible. (Even worse, it means they vote Democrat.)
When I hear Mitt Romney talk about the poor or even the middle class, he reminds me of an opinionated barber sounding off loudly about parts of the world he has never visited.  As David Brooks points out in his column Thurston Howell Romney:

It suggests that Romney doesn’t know much about the culture of America. Yes, the entitlement state has expanded, but America remains one of the hardest-working nations on earth. Americans work longer hours than just about anyone else. Americans believe in work more than almost any other people. Ninety-two percent say that hard work is the key to success, according to a 2009 Pew Research Survey.
It says that Romney doesn’t know much about the political culture. Americans haven’t become childlike worshipers of big government. On the contrary, trust in government has declined. The number of people who think government spending promotes social mobility has fallen.
The people who receive the disproportionate share of government spending are not big-government lovers. They are Republicans. They are senior citizens. They are white men with high school degrees. As Bill Galston of the Brookings Institution has noted, the people who have benefited from the entitlements explosion are middle-class workers, more so than the dependent poor.
Romney’s comments also reveal that he has lost any sense of the social compact. In 1987, during Ronald Reagan’s second term, 62 percent of Republicans believed that the government has a responsibility to help those who can’t help themselves. Now, according to the Pew Research Center, only 40 percent of Republicans believe that.

And what sort of view of taxes does Romney really have?  He is on record as saying that he pays not a dime more than he legally has to and I know from the tax record he has released that he pays a much lower marginal income tax rate that I do, but after months of being criticized for this low rate and what it might say about him as a person, it seems Romney actually agrees that there is a direct relationship between taxes paid and personal responsibility.
But having Romney lecture us about paying our fair share of income tax is like having George W. Bush lecture us about serving in the military in a time of war. These guys always act as though we are incapable of Googling them.

Here is a thought experiment: since Bush was working so hard to lower taxes and theoretically (if his rhetoric was true and these were not just tax cuts for the very rich) increasing the number of Americans at the margin who pay no income taxes, are the Republicans trying to increase the number of people who "are not taking personal responsibility or caring for" their life? If the Tea Party gets its way and government is shrunk to as close as zero as they can get it, doesn't that mean that most Americans will turn into deadbeats by Romney's definition of those who pay no taxes?  Is the Tea Party and the GOP therefore promoting irresponsibility?

Here is another thought experiment: if a population ages and a greater proportion is elderly, most of whom pay no income or low income taxes, does this mean that medical advances and the care of our elders create personal responsibility? Is a society with less advanced medical care and no social security or Medicare equivalent more personally responsible therefore? Should a medical researcher be discouraged from developing the next generation of artificial hip or a cancer drug out of fear that such developments are mathematically guaranteed to make the number of irresponsible people not caring for their lives rise, all things being equal?
Ditto for abortion: consider that most terminated pregnancies are unplanned for and unwanted. If forced to bring every pregnancy to term, the resultant children would be much more likely to be poor and a net consumer of federal, state, and local resources. By Mitt's logic, these children are irresponsible and not caring for their lives. So is Mitt Romney making a case for abortion? Or does he think he will encourage a pregnant woman to carry an unintended pregnancy to term by calling her and her child irresponsible and not caring for her life?


But in another setting, Romney tells us that he would have been better off Mexican.  Yes. If he were Mexican and he could find someone like his dad who paid for his private school, tutors, college, law school, and bought his house for him. And if no one discriminated against him along the way or asked to see his papers then got a little trigger happy when he was reaching for them. If he didn't "self deport" out of frustration for Arizona's discriminatory immigration laws White Guy Mitt supports. That sort of thing.

It's a very strange world where someone with ideas so offensive is polling at 45%.