Just about everybody was outraged by the video in which Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney was heard telling rich donors that the 47% of Americans who don’t pay any federal income taxes constitute a group of dependents who will vote for Obama no matter what. But the responses of conservatives were considerably more interesting.
Liberal commentators contented themselves with the same partisan cheerleading with which they’ve embarrassed themselves since they first felt a tingling in their legs over the advent of Barack Obama — e.g. Romney’s a gaffe machine Romney’s gonna lose Romney’s out of touch. It was left to conservatives to subject Romney’s remark to a probing empirical and philosophical refutation.
That they were willing to do so prior to a fateful election in which Romney is running against an incumbent whom they see as a nice-looking incompetent at best speaks well of contemporary conservatism and its respect for principles. Liberal commentators with the one exception of a column in the Washington Post by Richard Cohen critical of Obama’s foreign policy act as if any criticism of the president that could hurt his re-election chances is treasonous.
Irwin Seltzer in the conservative Weekly Standard took apart Romney’s 47% figure on empirical grounds. The non-taxpayers he noted include servicemen in combat zones retired workers living on social security and those who pay no taxes because of the earned income tax credit — aka the negative income tax (one of Milton Friedman’s big ideas) — designed to encourage working. Over half of those who pay no taxes are workers who do pay highly regressive payroll taxes but don’t earn enough to pay income taxes. And in point of fact about 35% of those who pay no taxes are expected to vote for Romney. In short the 47% hardly constitutes the neat division between Obama-supporting “takers” and Romney-supporting “makers.”
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