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Romney Misjudges Voters

By Clarence Page, Tribune Media Services on

But the 47 percent who didn't pay federal income taxes in 2011 didn't pay because they did not owe any taxes. More than half of them did work and paid payroll taxes and state and local taxes, but did not earn enough to pay federal income taxes, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. The rest were mostly elderly. Fewer than one in 10 were classified as nonworking.

And the taxes they paid amounted to a higher percentage of their income than they did for upper income earners, the center reports.

Although Romney allowed in a Fox News interview that he could have been more "elegant" with his remarks, he didn't back away from them. Rather, he believed we should have enough well-paying jobs that "people have the privilege of higher incomes" that would enable them to pay taxes.

"I think people would like to be paying taxes," he said in what may be the nicest thing that a major Republican candidate has said about taxes since the era before Ronald Reagan.

In fact, Romney used to like redistributive programs more back in the days when he was a moderate governor of Massachusetts. It appears that he has since put that former self into a blind trust held by the Tea Party.

 

That's politics. The political issue is not whether government redistributes but who pays and who benefits.

Besides, Romney should know better than to conflate the non-paying 47 percent with committed Obama voters. Only about two-thirds of people in families earning less than $30,000 voted for Obama in 2008, according to exit polls. The rest voted for Obama's Republican opponent, Sen. John McCain. If Romney really wants to give those low-income voters away, I'm sure Obama would be delighted to take them.

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E-mail Clarence Page at cpage(at)tribune.com.


(c) 2012 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.

 

 

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