Once again the mainstream media is doing its thing to promote their favored politician Barack Obama. Sure Mitt Romney’s choice of words in a June fundraiser may have been rather indelicate, but was it worthy of a week of non-stop coverage? It is when you’re doing your best to assassinate the persona of the opponent of your media God.
Romney said that 47 percent of the U.S. population pays no income taxes; his assertion is correct. Among that 47 percent are people who don’t pay taxes because they are drawing from Social Security or Medicare that they’ve contributed to throughout their lives. There are folks drawing disability benefits due to physical limitations that prevent them from working. What the press won’t acknowledge is that buried in that 47 percent are also people collecting Welfare, Food Stamps and gaming the system for collection of benefits or money which they are not entitled.
By no means is this an attempt to say that people who collect Food Stamps are not in need. With the millions of Americans that have lost jobs a spike in Food Stamps is a natural outcome. The same is true of Welfare. However both systems are fraught with fraud. Policies of the Obama administration have loosened the rules for qualifying for both and the number of participants has exploded. This isn’t a claim that people who are on these programs don’t want to find work; far from it. Nor do we want to create a system that discourages people from finding jobs that are available because it’s easier to collect from the government; but Romney did a miserable job of explaining that we’re encouraging an entitlement society.
Romney might not have said it in the most politically correct manner, however it was factually on-spot; people collecting government benefits aren’t likely to be in Romney’s wheelhouse. Focusing on collecting votes from folks that are dependent upon government benefits isn’t likely to produce votes for someone that is promising to rein in government spending, the biggest part of which is entitlement programs.
Romney didn’t say that 47 percent of the population was collecting benefits they were not entitled to; he wasn’t saying that all 47 percent had chosen to be government dependents; Romney was only pointing to the fact that over the last four years fewer and fewer people have been paying into the tax pool and greater amounts have gone out of the government coffers to pay for those benefits. Math tells us that you cannot keep subtracting money indefinitely without adding adequate funds to offset them.
Obama’s campaign offers no solutions to our race towards government bankruptcy other than to tax the rich. The president won’t tell folks that if you took every single dollar the top one percent earned as taxes it would only delay the inevitable failure of the dollar by a decade or less. Taxes cannot be collected of sufficient volume, in any instance, which can overcome the reckless spending of the Bush and Obama years.
Romney should not shrink from the critique being offered by the media; he should revel in it. Maintain those programs that people have themselves contributed to and alter them to create sustainability for those currently paying into the system. Shrink the size of government, in all aspects. Grow the economy by lightening the load on small business. Recognize that we’ve created a monster that encourages more and more people into government dependency and pledge to change a system that deflates the American Dream.
We must wake up before the election or pass a much more difficult problem on to the administration that will follow in 2016 while the inevitable pain of resolving the situation will be far greater than what we face today.
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