Dan Shaviro at NYU Law School is sometimes even more forthright than I am, which is always somewhat of a shock since I frequently am told that my style is "blunt", "forthright" or just plain "in your face." Shaviro has several posts on Romney's 47% comment on his "Start Making Sense" blog that illustrate our shared propensity for stating it like we see it.
On Monday, in "Romney versus the '47 percent'" (Sept. 17, 2012), Shaviro commented:
I think what's coming out here is the anger of someone who doesn't feel he should have to ask people for their votes, just as he feels he doesn't owe them any disclosure of his finances or of what policies he would follow. Contempt for the public, for democratic institutions, and for all people who disagree with him or offer insufficient deference is not a good basis for establishing trust. Id. (emphasis added).
Those are important points. Remember that we are talking about comments made by a presidential candidate to a group of people interested in funding his election to the presidency. Funders fund the ideas that they want to see advanced. In that setting, to show contempt for a large group of mostly seniors and working-class families suggests a hearty endorsement of the top-down class warfare that some on the right have been engaged in for decades. It also suggests a person who as president would simply not see a substantial, near-majority of the people he was elected to serve--not see their travails, not see their efforts to be part of the American dream, not see the obstacles placed in the way of realizing that dream by the financialization of the economy and similar changes. Power in the hands of someone who so scorns the basic processes of democracy would be more than worrisome--for many, it would prove a frightening prospect.
Shaviro's further exploration of the commentin his Tuesday post points out the "erroneous equation" Romney made among four quite different groups: (1) those who pay no federal income tax, (2) those who are supported by government handouts; (3) those who vote for Obama, and (4) those who (in Romney's words) "refuse to take personal responsibility".
Shaviro makes some important points here as well.
re (1) The pay-no-income-tax statistic is "meaningless" because it doesn't count all taxes and doesn't count tax-expenditure provisions. The "moochers" who benefit from such tax-expenditures is a broad group, including retirees who worked and now get Medicare and Social Security that they paid for at least in part and wealthy people like Romney, who use tax shelters and carried interest to lower their taxes while getting millions "of subsidies via the entity-level tax savings from loading up target companies with debt...plus reneging on pension guarantees that were taken over by the [government] PBGC."
re (2) The group in 2 (on the dole) is not the same as the group in 1 (pays no fed. income taxes).
re (3) The group in 3 (Obama voters) clearly isn't the same as the group in 1 (pays not fed. income taxes) or the group in 2 (on the dole): Shaviro points out that lots of seniors and people in poor states support Romney, and there are quite a few affluent, taxpaying Obama voters.
re (4) It's the next paragraph (about the group in 4) that is even blunter than what I usually write, so I'll quote it (with some omissions, though if you want to read the whole thing, I've put the link above).
On (4), ... merely having an extremely privileged background, and being so sheltered that you are totally unfamiliar with how millions of Americans live their lives ..., is not by itself nearly sufficient to get one to believing what Romney said ... about 47% of the country .... To believe what he said, you also need to have pathologically low empathy and curiosity, and it helps as well if you have uncommonly low intelligence. (A number of conservative bloggers have noted how stupid, ignorant, sophomoric, and uninformed his comments are. ... At some point, the presumptions from his private equity background and his flunkies' encomia to his never-observed brilliance have to give way to the evidence of one's own ears.)
...[C]ontrary to what we sometimes all believe, just because you're rich doesn't mean you're smart. Plenty of idiots have stumbled into large fortunes. Borrowing reams of money through target companies so that you can then divert the borrowed funds into your own pocket, leaving others to hold the bag if the target can't bear the carry, doesn't take great intelligence in an era when banks were making billions of dollars worth of foolish loans. It's like buying real estate in NYC, in the era when property values were shooting through the roof, and then deciding that you must be a genius because your properties appreciated like all the rest. Id.
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