Quote:
Originally Posted by Swanman
From what I read, the 47% is a fact based upon 2009 tax returns. Where Romney's message falls flat is that the 47% is made up of many different sets of circumstances. That amount is not entirely made up of freeloaders as his statement would have you believe.
Based on that blanket comment, Romney would have you believe that full-time students and soldiers deployed in combat zones are just looking for entitlements because they don't pay federal income tax. That's the problem with taking a stat like the 47% and making some awful blanket statement like he did.
Of course there are freeloaders. Any country with a population as big as the US's will have people that take advantage of the system. But to say that 47% of the population falls into that bucket is asinine.
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Let's review a couple of
facts.
* 46.4% of Americans don't pay federal income tax.
* 49% of Americans receive government subsidies through Medicaid, Medicare, SS, food stamps, or a housing assistance program.
The two groups are not identical. Some fall in one group but not the other. Some are in both. Will every one of those people vote for Obama? No. Does Obama own that demographic? Most certainly.
The problem here isn't Mitt Romney's generalization or the point that he's making about Obama's socialism-embracing base. It's the vacuous need on the part of some to interpret his comments ultra-literally and pretend that it's a gamechanger, which it's not, in order to distract from the failed economic and foreign policies of our current President.
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Obamacare’s fix for an American health care system that the federal government long ago broke, is to give the federal government far more power over American health care; that its solution to escalating health costs is to mandate greater health benefits (and, hence, higher costs); and that its solution to the pricey overreliance on pre-paid health plans — offered by insurance companies in lieu of real insurance — is to have the government require Americans to buy those pre-paid health plans under penalty of law.