All of us pay taxes. We just sometimes don't know it. But Romney wasn't just talking about the poor. He was talking about the leeches that want something for free.
Why are you so obsessed with the idea that somebody somewhere might get something they didn't, to your way of thinking, earn in some fashion? Those people a tiny number of the "takers". What about the other 90+% percent of the 47%, plus their dependents, all of whom are getting screwed over by a system which keeps them in poverty and sucks every last dollar they have to put a roof over their heads and food on the table.
You're picking up the peanuts while being trampled by the elephants man. Why not save your outrage for the REAL takers? Walmart operates 2010 stores in the US and each store location costs the American taxpayers, on averages, $422,000 for food stamps and Medicaid. That works out to $848 million dollars in low income subsidies and entitlements paid out to the employees of the second most profitable company in the world. Strike One.
The company has personnel in their Human Resources department to help the staff apply for food stamps and Medicaid. At the same time, they ensure that hourly rated employees never work enough hours to qualify for the corporate health insurance plan (more cash in Walmart's coffers), or make so much money that they'll lose their "entitlements". As a consequence, the staff pays no income tax. This is no small-time hustle here mud.
Isn't the whole point of creating an economic climate where everyone has a job, and can pay taxes, is to enable the government to have the resources to enable the genertion to succeed? How can that happen when the second most profitable corporation in the world is siphoning off nearly a billion dollars of taxpayers' hard earned dollars in order to maximize profits, all while making sure that are paid so little, that none of that money flows back to the goverment in the form of income tax.
What's worse, because Walmart is so large and has no compunctions about driving every store within miles out of business, it kills those jobs, destroying those businesses and further reducing the tax base in their communities. Companies who compete against Walmart are forced to adopt similar wage and benefits strategies and now the entire big box retail industry is subsidizing its profits on the backs of the American middle class taxpayers who are paying the highest overall taxes of anyone.
Here's the thing that should be really frosting your cookies. If Walmart paid each and everyone of their 1.4 US employees just $5,000 a year more, that nearly $848 million dollars paid in entitlements goes back into the US treasury, thereby reducing the deficit, and all Walmart employees become federal income tax paying citizens,, thereby reducing the deficit. Walmart still makes very a handsome profit of $8.7 billion dollars which is a very acceptable ROI and is still 2 on the Forbes Fortune 500.
You complain that Obama just wants to re-distribute the money that the wealthy have rightfully earned to lazy shiftless bums who are robbing the country blind at the expense of the hard-working American middle class. You're looking in the wrong direction on the economic scale to find out whose's taking the hard earned tax dollars being sucked out of the middle and working classes.
While Rush and Mitt and Newt, and the rest of the smoke and mirrors brigade over at Fox
distract you stories of the lazy 47% Walmart is fleecing the American tax payers to the tune of nearly $1 billion dollars per year. And they're not the only ones doing this. If you read genuine mainstream business publications instead of right win blogs writtenn by conspiracy theory nutjobs, you'd see it going on.
Nothing Walmart and Monsanto and the others do is illegal, but is it fair or moral? All of Walmart's competitive pricing strategies, require that they continuous pressure suppliers to lower their manufacturing costs and again there is pressure to keep wages low enough that their employees fall below the minimum threshold for federal income tax.
The first order of business should be for Fortune 500 businesses to stop forcing the federal government to provide food and medical care to it's employees. If you make that money, you should be paying enough it to your workers that your profits don't look like an obscenity.
How long are you going to continue living in the bubble?