http://newsbusters.org/blogs/brent-baker/2012/09/17/nbc-s-williams-jumps-highlight-surreptitiously-recorded-romney-comments
On the way in today, in my pre-caffeinated state I heard Don Imus ranting over a comment Romney made yesterday, implying that ‘he doesn’t care about the 47% of Americans who are going to vote for Obama.’ I felt a thrill go up my leg, the same one I get any time I can sense the mainstream media trying to spin a valid statement made by someone who is not a Democrat into a gaffe that Romney can be attacked for.
Now I’m used to Libs having to ‘restate’ something said by Obama or Biden because the rest of us are simply too stupid to understand the true meaning behind their comments. For that reason alone, I refuse to re-state what Romney said:
“There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the President no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the 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. That that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what… And I mean the President starts off with 47 percent, 48, 49 – 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. So he’ll be out there talking about tax cuts for the rich. I mean, that’s what they sell every four years. And so my job is not to worry about these people. I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.
What I have to do is to convince the five to ten percent in the center that are independents, that are thoughtful, that look at voting one way or the other depending upon, in some cases, emotion, whether they like the guy or not.”
Ok – so where’s the problem here? Romney is acknowledging that Obama’s biggest voting block is a group of Americans who pay no income taxes and are entitled to being looked after by big government. The guy was speaking plain English, and in my mind – making perfect sense.
I think that most Conservatives would agree here – that the entitlement mentality that got Obama into office can’t be cracked by offering income tax cuts – they don’t pay any. That mentality can’t be cracked by talk of cutting entitlements – they depend on them. That 47% for all intents and purposes will vote for whoever promises to give them the most (whether or not they actually deliver on the promises). So by that statement, Romney is going to focus on the other 53% who do pay income taxes which includes the ‘5-10%’ of independents who can go either way and may vote for an emotional reason instead of a logical one.
I’m not restating anything here, I’m quoting what he said and giving you my thoughts on it. See folks, I’m one of those people who believes that instead of the Government redistributing wealth and driving our nations debt to record levels by granting more and more entitlements to Americans (who may be perfectly capable of entitling THEMSELVES), I believe in PEOPLE redistributing wealth. I believe that when I go out and pay for goods or services, I am actively redistributing my wealth to those who I believe have EARNED it.
Obama’s last great hope for re-election is that he can increase the entitlement mentality which got him elected enough so that the ideas of freedom, free enterprise, and personal responsibility will fall on deaf ears because the majority of Americans are so happy driving in their government subsidized Chevrolet after filling up the tank using unemployment benefits on the way to the local supermarket where they can spend their food stamps on a big ‘ol brick of Velveeta.
Are there people who actually need help, who can’t help themselves? Absolutely. Should the Government be in charge of helping them? I don’t think so. See, one of the major goals of any business is to make money and to grow. The business makes money and grows by providing goods and services that people want to buy. The benefit of a business being profitable and growing is that it allows them to improve their products, grow their markets, create new jobs, and find new ways to reach out to their customers and perpetuate the cycle. The problem here is that Government wants to act like a business. It wants to provide goods and services to consumers. As the Government redistributes more wealth, it increases the number of consumers who use its products, which makes it grow and expand to keep up with demand. Since the Government doesn’t actually produce anything, and people can’t voluntarily buy anything as they would with a normal business, the Government increases taxes on income, goods, and services in order to support its growth. There is no benefit to government growth. The only thing that happens as government grows bigger is that it consumes more of our money against our will, restricts our rights and freedoms more to allow itself to grow, and slowly but surely convinces us (like Apple with the iPhone) that we NEED their products.
The punch line is that while buying an iPhone will hollow out your wallet, buying into big government and its entitlements will hollow out your future. We don’t NEED entitlements, we don’t NEED a new iPhone, but for some percentage of our population, having them makes them all warm and fuzzy inside until some evil Republican carrying a Google Nexus says “Are we all better off than we were $8 trillion dollars ago?”
