It’s so much fun waiting for the next foot-in-mouth moment with Mitt Romney, isn’t it?
I mean, you just know he’s going to say something dopey. The latest was actually uttered way back in May.
Here’s part of it:
“Well, there are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. There are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that 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. ... I mean, he starts off with a huge number. These are people who pay no income tax; 47 percent of Americans pay no income tax. So our message of low taxes doesn’t connect.”
Now this is dopey on a lot of levels. Mainly because probably half of that 47 percent he’s talking about are Republicans. What about all the voters in the south? A lot of them are low-income. A lot of them fall below the earning threshhold that would require them to pay federal income tax. They’re reliable Republican voters. What about senior citizens? Republicans. People in the miltary? Republicans.
So that was really a dopey thing to say, but that’s not what I want to write about anyway.
What I think is instructional about his comments is the fact – and it is a fact – that 47 percent of Americans pay no income tax.
After the gaffe, the Romney campaign’s response was to trot out a video in which President Barack Obama says he believes in income redistribution.
Of course he does. All politicians do.
If you want to talk about redistribution of income, look no further than the tax code.
According to Internal Revenue Service data, the top 1 percent of earners shoulder 37 percent of the federal tax burden, while earning 17 percent of the nation’s income.
Let’s look at the top 10 percent of earners. They‘re responsible for 71 percent of the tax burden while taking home 43 percent of the income.
That’s some serious income redistribution. And I don’t hear either candidate too riled up about that.
And despite the huge amount of income the IRS sucks out of the private sector each year, it’s not even close to enough. We’re running trillion-dollar-plus deficits every year.
Interestingly, there are a couple tax watchdog outfits that calculate what they call “Cost of Government Day.”
That’s the day when the average American has earrned enough gross income to pay off his or her share of spending and regulatory burdens imposed by government at all levels.
This year, it’s July 15.
You heard right, sports fans. Working people spent 167 days this year, toiling away to feed the monster that is government.
And the government is still broke.
This year was the fourth year in a row that the Cost of Government Day landed in July.
That, to me, is the biggest problem facing the nation. We really don’t have an awful revenue problem. We’ve got a profligate spending problem.
Politicians have absolutely no backbone when it comes to the spending problem. They want to be sure that no one suffers any pain. They don’t want to take anything away from anybody – except income, that is. Politicians don’t feel bad about taking our income.
They just feel bad about taking our benefits. The problem is, there’s no way out of this mess without everybody feeling the pain.
And here’s a flash.
If politicians let us keep the income, maybe we wouldn’t need quite as many benefits.
I’ve been talking so far about the federal government, of course. But the problem goes way deeper than that. Have you ever surfed up a list of taxes you have to pay for all manner of government services at all levels that you may or may not even want. It’s stunning.
And then, on top of that, federal, state and local governments require all manner of licenses and fees. The cost of those get passed along to the rest of us by the people who provide the services that require licensing.
It’s unending and it’s all about the revenue, because government at virually every level is broke.
Do you suppose that big crackdown on the lakes this summer when the Department of Natural Resources was ticketing people for the wrong size registration numbers had anything to do with revenue?
And, by the way, the boat owner already paid a registration fee, a boat excise tax fee, a DNR fee and a “Lake and River Enhancement” fee, just for the privilege of getting that ticket.
So why do you suppose it is that government, essentially, is broke?
Well, I have a good idea.
It seems as if, as long as tax dollars are being spent, the sky’s the limit. No one in govenment ever seems to scrimp.
Sure, you see all the craziness with Pentagon spending at the federal level. You see the trillions of dollars of unfunded pension liabilities for cops, firemen and teachers at the state level.
But I have been in the small daily newspaper business quite a while and I have seen plenty of local examples of tax dollars silliness.
If you build a school, it costs like $200 per square foot because of all the government hooey involved.
I’ve watched town marshalls make a pitch for new guns at $1,200 a copy when the guns they have aren’t even close to worn out and still shoot way straighter then the guy holding it is capable of shooting it.
I’ve watched a town clerk order up a $3,000 work station because she had to have the “state-approved software” when an HP from Walmart for $499 and some QuickBooks would have done just fine.
I’ve seen a $400,000 candy counter and a $600,000 storage shed.
I’m to the point now where my candidate choices have become pretty simple:
I don’t care if he insults people, stomps puppies, trips little old ladies in the crosswalk and steals cookie money from Girl Scouts.
I’m voting for the guy committed to shrinking government – at all levels.
