I’m not sure we are seeing all the sources of resentment against the fabled 47% who don’t pay income taxes. Romney was caught affecting to despise and write off this 47% who, according to Romney:
a) Don’t pay income taxes.
b) Are going to vote for Obama.
c) Are dependent and think of themselves as victims.
d) Can’t be convinced to “take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”
Romney said this in front of a wealthy audience and it is tempting to dismiss this attitude as a rich person thing. I think that is a mistake. On the center-right, the resentment of the 47% runs much farther down the income distribution. You see it on the Fox News business shows that are mostly about complaining about Obama and regulation. You hear it from callers on talk radio. The people calling in to complain about the 47% generally aren’t titans of finance. Some of them probably don’t make much above the median. They also tell you their own stories. They work hard. They don’t have a lot of job security. They worry (or are resigned) that they are going to be working past 65. The idea that somebody is getting something for nothing is an insult to the dignity they are earning for themselves every day, and it makes the anxiety of losing it all even more galling.
But here is the thing: Theses callers know it is a lot more complicated when it comes to the 47%. If you just talk to them (or really listen), they know that many in the 47% are hard working parents with several kids or retirees. Their worldview is more nuanced than it seems if you just listen to one call. Most of us blow off steam and say things that wouldn’t withstand sharp critical scrutiny because they aren’t intended to do any such thing. This is an audience that would be receptive to a pro-growth, anti-rent seeking limited-but-effective government message.
The 47% stuff is filling the vacuum where there should be a Republican message of broadly rising living standards. And so Romney, with the confused and self-destructive cynicism that has defined his general election campaign, thought he could get benefit our of repeating the frustrated talk radio caller. One problem is that Romney isn’t a frustrated working or middle-class guy blowing off some steam after work. So he ended up sounding like the love child of Thurston Howell and Willy Loman. A bigger problem is that cynical pols like Romney (and Michelle Bachmann on this issue) end up feeding into this self-defeating narrative because it seems easier than making a real argument about health care or taxes or what have you.
PS: I wrote that Romney was “affecting to despise and write off” the 47% because I don’t for a second believe that Romney believed (or even especially understood) the nonsense he was saying. It was just what he thought his (rich) marks wanted to hear that night. So if it makes you feel any better, it isn’t like he was showing any more respect for his rich audience than the 47% he was dissing.
September 27th, 2012 | 8:07 pm
right on the money…
September 27th, 2012 | 8:55 pm
Agreed. Romney spoke a fact to rich donors. But the 47% may have been “right on the Romney” as well as right on the money too.
Isn’t the take of left and right critics–of particular bent and for different reasons–that Romney will say whatever it takes to get elected?
I suppose all candidates do this, but Romney himself needs to do better in his own defense than saying that BOTH he and Obama care about all Americans as he did in his recent TV ad. Why not vote for Obama if that is the case?
Once again, I think that Pete’s true talent as advisor and speech writer for Romney is being wasted! Pete speaks (and I could extrapolate on this) of the problems of fiscal unsustainability, as well as the ways in which lower taxes and fewer regulations in a orderly legal regime providing settled and standing rules can spur economic growth. That’s a partisan case that attempts to connect itself to the permanent and aggregate interests of what is called the People of the United States.
But then the Romney campaign gives us this pablum instead–
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_HjDCHbtXHQ&feature=player_embedded
It’s not a bad ad, but it goes back to talk of “compassion” (echoes of GW Bush), and it makes promises of creating 12 million jobs amongst other things. How? In what way? “Trust me, I’m an expert.” Obama says the same thing.
September 28th, 2012 | 5:53 am
“The 47% stuff is filling the vacuum where there should be a Republican message of broadly rising living standards.”
Just what would the content of such a message be? Living standards are not rising broadly in the least at the moment. What is actually happening, and has been for decades is the steady movement of wealth in this country into the hands of fewer and fewer people. This is a fact that is perfectly plain from the census data. And this movement is accelerating with every passing decade.
There is nothing even remotely resembling a level playing field that would allow everybody, no matter what their income, the chance to accumulate wealth. Not wealth on the scale of Mitt Romney, just a level of ordinary comfort that my parents took for granted. Passbook savings? Don’t be absurd. Interest rates there don’t even cover inflation. Certificates of deposit? Not much better, but a rate of accumulation that would require saving about 50% of your income for 30% of your life.
Who can do that? Can you? Merely to watch numbers rise on a balance sheet? I know people making $8-$11 dollars an hour, whose work requires them to travel, beyond ordinary commuting, anywhere from 20-30 miles daily. They get no mileage allowance and the last two gasoline price spikes had them working for negative income for a space of several weeks. They were paying to have a job! Can you think of anything more absurd?
The only game in town is the Stock Market. And nobody should be anywhere near this unless they have a six figure income. Why? Because they don’t have enough capital behind them to ride out the crashes that happen routinely about every 8-10 years, and are getting worse. This last one damn near took down the banking system with it.
The last possibility for anyone below the median income of $50,000 to make any headway at all was home equity. And this required about $.75 debt service for every $.25 of net accumulation. Hardly a formula for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
And now it’s gone. There are now home owners saddled with debt who have negative equity in their houses! The housing bubble was not created by the people buying homes. It was manufactured in the underbelly of the banking business by the leveraging of questionable debt into surplus profit.
Beyond this kids are taking on debt levels I didn’t reach until I was 40 (!) simply to get four years of college. Under current conditions there is no way on earth that they will ever be free of that debt. They don’t even have the option of bankrupting offered to any business when it fails. And businesses fail as much as they succeed, if not more so.
What comes next? Debtor’s prison, like something out of Dickens?
Now I could get on my high horse and point fingers about it. But that is pointless, really. I can ask a question, however.
What possible message of broadly rising living standards could the Republican Party offer?
September 28th, 2012 | 1:12 pm
Whenever the left sings loudly and relentlessly to toxify an idea, it is safe to presume that idea might have merit.
Inartfully stated perhaps, but with this comment, all Romney has done has brought an long-standing academic concern into retail politics. (See for example, Democracy: The God that Failed: The Economics and Politics of Monarchy, Democracy, and Natural Order by
Hans-Hermann Hoppe)
The simple reality is that when people are dependent on government for a conspicuous benefit, they will accept any number or type of deformities of purpose, scope or scale in order to preserve that “benefit” that they are dependent or reliant upon.
Like someone who failed to control a fire-they are no longer the master, but the servant. Anybody who has witnessed campaigns where one politician accuses the other of planning to reduce Social (in)Security has seen this principal in operation.
The purpose of democracy is to obtain the consent of the governed to avoid tyranny.
When the governed lose vigilance over the public treasury to a manipulative ruling class with a pathogical propensity for profligacy and falsehood, and that exists apart from, and above them-using the political apparatus to provide “benefits” completely uncoupled from a clear and direct cost, we are on the road to statism and tyranny.
For one hundred years now, the federal tax code has caused the citizenry to debate “who pays”, rather than should there be a payment. Fiscal affairs are now a war of all, against all.
The sad fact is that there are fewer and fewer people who remain resolute and sober against this assault on the individual. Instead, we have sock puppets like Sandra Fluke who popularize the idea of selling your vote and soul for cheap baubles.
September 28th, 2012 | 5:08 pm
Joseph, “Just what would the content of such a message be?”
It could be a lot of things. To use your student debt example, it could be something like Rick Perry’s idea of the $10,000 dollar degree. Yes, THAT Rick Perry. http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/perry-and-profs_593055.html?page=2
National Affairs is stuffed to the gills with ideas. Even stuff that is ore avoiding future dangers is worthwhile like reducing the promised benefits to future life time high earning retirees in order to avoid damaging tax cuts in the nearer future. You make the redistributive state more progressive and you avoid growth dampening tax increases (though I doubt you can avoid any tax increases thought fewer would be better.)
September 30th, 2012 | 3:55 pm
Pete Spiliakos — The world is full of ideas. Some good, some bad, some that could be improved upon and made to suit the greater interest better if presented in good faith and the spirit of compromise in an arena where conflicts of interest were seen as inevitable and other interests were recognized as legitimate.
But those ideas, and any recognition of the legitimacy or good intentions of those who see the issues differently, aren’t part of what the GOP and conservatives pundits and candidates are or have been selling in the popular and powerful right wing media and in their campaigns. What they have been selling is mostly resentment.
For awhile that was enough. But its not enough anymore. The problems are too big and the consequences are too serious. So why can’t they retreat from it? Is it because, first and foremost, they really do hate, fear and disdain those Americans whose interest conflict with theirs and whose concern for the best interest of the country is informed by a different perspective and experience than their own? Is it because they are more concerned with gaining and holding onto power than in good governance?
Among those I know on the Left I don’t know a single person who doesn’t lament the loss of an opposition party willing to lend its voice and effort to working with others to find agreed upon solutions to commonly agreed upon problems. On the Right, I can’t find anyone willing to accept anything less than “my way or the highway.”
September 30th, 2012 | 5:56 pm
Mary, I can’t tell you how happy it makes me hear that those you know “on the Left” want a Right that would “lend its voice and effort to working with others to find agreed upon solutions to commonly agreed upon problems.” Naturally these people revere Paul Ryan for his willingness to craft compromise proposals with left-of-center figures like Ron Wyden and Alice Rivlin. They must have had so much of their faith in our political system restored when Romney selected Ryan as his running mate.
Oh wait, they meant something more like Lincoln Chafee or Jim Jeffords? They want nominal Republicans who would do what your friends “on the Left” wanted when the chips were down? That is such a disappointment.
But never mind those hypocrites. What I want to do is thank YOU for your commitment to open-minded compromise. Thank you for supporting a compromise version of the most recent Ryan budget that increases the level of federal taxation from 19% to 20% of GDP, that makes Social Security more progressive by reducing the growth of promised benefits to future high earner retirees, and uses the freed up funds to increase spending on Medicaid, infrastructure and education. Thank you for being willing to accept the principle of premium support Medicare and a version of Social Security reform that doesn’t include tax increases. Thank you for avoiding a “my way or the highway” attitude. Thank you for not being like President Obama on these issues. You are an inspiration. You and Paul Ryan.
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