It turns out that Mitt Romney was right. There is class warfare being
waged in the 2012 campaign. It is Mr. Romney who is waging it, not
President Obama, and he’s stood the whole idea on its head.
When you think of class warfare, you probably think of inciting anger,
resentment and jealousy among the have-nots against the haves. That’s
what Mr. Romney has accused Mr. Obama of doing, but those charges have
always been false. The truth is that Mr. Romney has been trying to
incite the anger of a small slice of the richest Americans who need no
government assistance but get it anyway, against the working poor, older
Americans, the disabled workers and veterans, and even a significant
chunk of middle-class Americans.
That was the message of remarks that Mr. Romney made in May at a private
fund-raiser held at a private equity manager’s estate in Florida, a
moment when he thought he was safe from annoying reporters and
cameramen, and other Americans who are not rich enough to have bought a
ticket to the event.
A video made public on Monday
by the magazine Mother Jones showed a Mitt Romney who felt free to
speak candidly about his campaign and how he would conduct a presidency.
In that safe zone, Mr. Romney spoke with a bone-chilling cynicism and a
revolting smugness. If he is elected, he said, capital will come back
and “we’ll see — without actually doing anything — we’ll actually get a
boost in the economy.” That’s the state of trickle-down economics in the
21st century.
Gone was the pretense that he will be a president of all Americans. Mr.
Romney rather neatly divided the country between the people who matter
and the 47 percent he does not care about.
To Mr. Romney, that 47 percent consists of people who do not make enough
money to be required to pay federal income tax. They are freeloaders,
he said, “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.” It is not his job, he said, as a candidate nor
apparently as president if he is elected, “to worry about those
people.”
By his definition, those undeserving freeloaders include workers in
low-paying, menial jobs (sometimes more than one job) who don’t even
earn $9,750 a year, the amount at which they would start to owe federal
income tax. Also included are older Americans whose Social Security
pensions are too low to be taxed, disabled veterans and people who were
maimed on the job.
This group also includes some middle-income Americans who make, say,
$50,000 a year but are not required to pay taxes after they take
advantage of child credits, marriage penalty relief and other tax
breaks, many of which are part of the Bush-era tax cuts that Mr. Romney
backs with a blind ideological fervor.
But, of course, Mr. Romney was not talking about the Americans who make
so much money that they are able to avoid paying any tax at all or who,
like him, are able to shelter their incomes in overseas banks or tax
loopholes that permit them to pretend that ordinary income comes from
investment and thus pay lower taxes. Mr. Romney has been paying, by his
own account, about 13 percent to 15 percent of his enormous income in
federal income taxes. Just compare that with your own tax return.
Everything about Mr. Romney’s characterization
of this mythical slice of lazy, shiftless Americans was wrong. A vast
majority of Americans pay federal taxes, either income tax or payroll
taxes for Social Security and Medicare — or both — as well as other
federal fees. They also pay state and local taxes and sales taxes.
The government’s revenue problem does not start with the poor but with
the richest people, through the Bush tax cuts and other changes. The tax
cuts for the richest people should expire now, and the middle-class
cuts should do so eventually. But that will not happen as long as people
like Mr. Romney protect the rich by turning the working poor and middle
class into the enemy.
Mr. Romney may have been talking about electoral tactics: those people
are going to vote for Mr. Obama, so let’s concentrate on our kind of
people. It’s also possible that he was mouthing the words of the extreme
right without really believing them. But all the possible explanations
say terrible things about Mr. Romney’s character.
The right wing has long been whining about people who don’t pay taxes
and who, therefore, don’t deserve a say in government. They have it
backward. The shame is not that those people don’t pay income taxes. The
shame is how many poor people there are when the top 1 percent can
amass uncountable fortunes fed by tax breaks and can donate tens of
millions of dollars to political candidates to keep it that way.
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