But my main concern is about Romney's 47% as being taker's of assistance I have to ask why do people label welfare recipients as "lazy?" Are we looking at those who don't attain jobs? Are we looking at the fact that its a race issue?
First Romney got i facts wrong. The 47% figure was the percentage of income tax return filers who owed no income tax in 2011. Many of these were reasonably wealthy (5% got to zero because of the exclusion for tax-free bond interest). Then Romney went into his riff about dependency. Paying no income tax is a quite different thing from being dependent on the government in most people's universe.
In another thread I and a few other people crunched the numbers. At the most generous, only 5% of return filers could be coonsidered recipients of means-tested assistance. If you take out the retired, disabled, students, and working poor, you get to less than one percent. So this is a stereotype not based in current reality.
But it is a convenient stereotype for a certain ideology. It goes along with the idea that private sector jobs are productive while public sector jobs are not. If your water comes from a private water company, its workers are productive; but if it is municipally owned, its workers are "dependent on government". So are the medical staff of VA hospitals, actively serving military including Seal Team Six, millions of schoolteachers, law enforcement, emergency service responders, and, yes, the clerks who record your property deeds. All are useless, but if we privatize the function so a major corporation can rake off 20% or so, magically all of these people become productive. Enter the voucher idea, forcing Medicare recipiients to choose among private inflated cost insurance plans. Same with schools.
"Individual investment accounts" in Social Security do the same thing. Wall Street gets another stream of fee income for investments that have for a decade underperformed the Treasury securiies comprising the trust funds. The risk of investment loss has been transfered from the Social Security system to the individual retiree.
There is also the idea that the solution to funding problems is to means-test social insurance. This converts a self-funded insurance system into a welfare program which can be cut or eliminated in the future.
I hope you see a pattern. People like the Koch brothers support this ideology because this is how they make money. The bst return on investment is always going to be political contributions to further this agenda. As these changes take place, income inequality increases, virtually all the economic improvement goes to the very top of the income ladder, and everyone else has a declining standard of living.
This also makes America less competitive. Fewer college graduates, poorer public education, decreasing life expectancy in major groups, gutting basic research, and crumbling infrastructure cripple economic growth.
So follow the money. The lies are profitable lies.
