I’m trying to understand Mitt Romney’s explanation of his remarks to wealthy donors last May, of which a video was leaked the other day, in which he decried the “47%” of the U.S. population who don’t pay federal taxes (his numbers were a bit off, but that’s ok).<\/p>\n
I completely get why candidate Romney would be thumping his chest last spring and flattering wealthy conservatives, in his drive to raise money for a presidential run. That kind of behind the scenes posing is part of the game of electoral politics. And I’m not completely comfortable with the leak of the video. Expecting candidates to present the same message to all audiences, even in what are supposed to be closed-door events, seems to me an impossibly high bar.<\/p>\n
But once the video went public, I had expected him to back off at least a little from such an extreme statement. Yet Romney did just the opposite — he dug in and said he stands by the message, although he allowed that he had said it “inelegantly”.<\/p>\n
As I understand it, the miscreants Mitt Romney warns about include those retirees who, having paid into Social Security for many years, are now living off the fund they already paid into (Social Security benefits as sole retirement income is not subject to federal taxes).<\/p>\n
Is he saying that there is something wrong with being old while not being rich? What should these people have done instead? Refused to pay into Social Security as an act of civil disobedience? What, exactly, does Mitt Romney think<\/i> he’s saying?<\/p>\n
I’m trying to understand what the political strategy is here. And for the life of me I can’t.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’m trying to understand Mitt Romney’s explanation of his remarks to wealthy donors last May, of which a video was leaked the other day, in which he decried the “47%” of the U.S. population who don’t pay federal taxes (his numbers were a bit off, but that’s ok). I completely get why candidate Romney would … Continue reading “Trying to understand”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9473"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9473"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9473\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9475,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9473\/revisions\/9475"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9473"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9473"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9473"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}