Written by thomas bonsell   

Much has been written and discussed about Mitt Romney’s illuminating words disparaging the 47% of Americans who don’t pay federal income taxes. And an equal amount of type has been used to identifying who those 47% are with a few saying the real figure is 46%. Too many Republicans conveniently forget to include “income” when they accuse others of paying “no taxes.”

Nothing has been written – until now – showing that Romney is every bit the “moocher” who is dependent on government as do those he insults. But it is a Republican tactic of attributing to others what is so despicable in oneself, called transference by those in the behavior sciences and a term coined by Sigmund Freud. A person only has to look at the voting bloc in Congress to see a constant 100 percent Republican opposition to nearly everything a Democratic president proposes. It went that way mostly through the Clinton administration – and only changed on the budget after it was apparent the nation was heading towards a balanced budget and the GOP wanted to stake a claim to the success all Republicans initially opposed – and now continues in the Obama administration. In short, the Republican Party is the most rock-solid collective in American life, but it constantly accuses others as being “collective.” And claiming nearly half the population to be “moochers” who are lazy and unmotivated to take responsibility for their lives and blaming them for our problems is typical conservative tactic of trying to avoid responsibility and run away from the problems those cons created.

Romney could be called a moocher who claims to be a victim because he does not pay taxes that the vast majority of American adults do pay; the payroll Social Security and Medicare tax. Romney’s mooching comes in slightly different form than that he laid onto others. To understand that we have to go back three decades to Reagan Reagan’s Revolution and his “economic miracle” that wasn’t. It should be noted that Reagan supporters for years praised Saint Ronnie for freeing millions of people from paying the hated income tax; but now they attack the same people as “moochers.”

In 1981, Reagan, a GOP Senate and conservative House slashed taxes mostly across the board, but weighted in favor of the wealthy. When the economy took a nosedive and deficits started to soar, Reagan led the 1982 effort to rescind much of those cuts, but not on the wealthy. He also raised the gasoline tax, the liquor tax and the tobacco tax. Then in 1983, he got huge tax increases in the payroll tax. That tax started to produce massive surpluses, so Reagan and his GOP Senate and conservative House coconspirators created the Deficit Reduction Act of 1984 that required the Social Security surpluses to go to the Treasury to cover up the deficits in income-tax collections. In modern times, the amount of money going to government from the payroll tax is almost equal to the income-tax receipts (one percentage point difference). That means that being exempt from paying the Social Security tax is as significant as being exempt from the income tax, but Republicans can’t bring themselves to mention or acknowledge that.

Romney’s income for the past several years has come from capital income that is called “carried interest”; that is from dividends, capital gains, interest and profits from private equity; i.e. his past involvement in Bain Capital. All of that is taxed at a vastly lower rate than is income from labor, and none of it is subject to the payroll tax for Social Security and Medicare.

But first, let’s examine who constitutes the 47% (46%) that Romney thinks only take from those like himself who “make” the nation’s wealth.

We have 18% of Americans presently drawing income from Social Security that they paid for during their working lives. They are almost universally on Medicare, which charges them about $100 a month in “premiums.” Since the United States Constitution specifies that Congress can tax and spend to promote the “general welfare” of the nation we can have Medicare. The Constitution doesn’t provide for Congress to collect premiums to be spent for the general welfare, so what seniors pay are taxes. If Chief Justice John Roberts can proclaim that fines a person must pay not to have health insurance is really a tax, then we can proclaim the “premiums” Medicare recipients pay is also a tax; a tax that Romney doesn’t pay.

About 15% of Americans are in working poverty, thanks to George W. Bush who raised that rate from the 11.3% he inherited from Bill Clinton. So they also wouldn’t earn enough to pay income taxes; but they do pay the payroll tax that Romney doesn’t pay.

That’s 33% right there, and nearly all pay taxes.

A brief aside on the history of poverty. It shows a distinctive pattern. When Dwight Eisenhower left office, 22.5 percent of Americans lived in poverty. When Lyndon Johnson left office 12% of Americans were in poverty thanks to his Great Society programs. Richard Nixon continued the Great Society and added a little to it and poverty notched down a point or two. Jimmy Carter left a poverty rate of 11.4%, the historic low at the time, to Ronald Reagan. When Reagan’s successor George H. W. Bush left office, 15.1% of Americans were in poverty. Bill Clinton lowered the poverty rate to the present record low of 11.3% only to see George W. Bush run it back up above 15% with his Great Recession. So, if those in poverty haven’t taken care of the own lives, are lazy, shiftless, dependent of government and only mooch from others, what is it about Republican policies that make millions of Americans that way? We didn’t lose Johnson’s War on Poverty, we quit fighting and the GOP could do nothing except retreat.

We also have almost 8 percent of the population unemployed, so they wouldn’t be expected to pay an income tax unless other income – such as from investments – was sky high. And much of that constant unemployment is a direct result of the war against the working class begun under Reagan and religiously pursued ever since by the Republican Party that Romney now heads.

So we have 41% of the population accounted for in this exercise.

That leaves only 5%-6% who are left who pay no taxes (in Romney‘s mind). But his assessment isn’t true. There are 1.6 million untaxed Americans in the military (2010 figure), but that is about .6% of the population. The remaining 4-5plus% includes the single mother who cleans houses for a living. She must pay the entire 15.3% of payroll taxes (normal rate of employer-employee contributions before Obama temporarily lopped off two percentage points from the employee’s half). This group will also include temporary and seasonal workers, craftsmen and handymen who go from job to job or anyone else who is self-employed and doesn’t have permanent employment. This 4-5plus% category would also include people who are not counted as “unemployed” because their benefits have run out and they aren’t seeking jobs that are not to be found because of GOP policies put into practice. The final segment of Romney’s “moocher” class would be persons who can’t work because of physical, emotional or mental problems, hardly a financial problem for a civilized society. So we see that the facts indicate there are very few Americans who are “lazy and irresponsible” as Romney and the rest of the political right claim.

Romney only pays about 14% in taxes because of the many loopholes and special considerations Congress has given to the most-wealthy Americans and because much of his fortune is stashed away in foreign “tax havens.” The taxes not paid by Romney and his fellow aristocrats must be made up from somewhere else. That somewhere else for the past three decades is mostly from the surplus in the Social Security and Medicare tax that Reagan, the GOP Senate and conservative House required with the Deficit Reduction Act to go into the Treasury to mask the paucity of income-taxes collections. We borrow the rest. And that surplus of payroll taxes that is required to go to the Treasury to make up for what Romney doesn’t pay constitutes about 20 percent of the United States debt. China holds only 8%. By this con job, the right has forced the working middle class to subsidize the leisure aristocratic class.

And workers who make a livable income are subjected to the two taxes (income and payroll) that account for 81percent of government income while “moochers” like Romney are subjected to only one (the income tax). In that way Romney is a worse moocher because he has the ability to easily pay the two taxes while those he denigrates can just barely pay the one. Even those too destitute to pay these two main sources of government income still pay taxes, such as on gasoline, liquor, tobacco, if they buy such products, and many other minor taxes.

So, Romney is being subsidized by that single house-cleaning mother and the other self-employed who barely scrape by. And so are the aristocratic fat cats to whom Romney revealed his true self to be in his Boca Raton rant against tax-paying American citizens. There are a few millionaires, estimated to be about 7,000 in 2011, (up from almost 1,500 in 2009) who have paid no taxes because of special loopholes, deductions and other write-offs given by Congress. It’s doubtful Romney was referring to them. And he considers it unfair for anyone to ask him to pay an amount equal to that paid by the single house-cleaning mother, for if he were required to pay his fair share he would be a “victim” and would be “punished” for his success. Romney claimed his 47% rely on government for their food, health care and other necessities that isn’t true, as shown above. But Romney does rely on government to stack the economic deck in his favor, to continue to deal off the bottom for his advantage, to fix the game then bribe the umpires and referees to keep the game rigged for Romney’s profitability, an exalted position for which Romney and fellow aristocrats may feel “entitled.” And he proposes, if elected, that he would pay less in taxes; the single house-cleaning mother, she’s out of luck. Romney and his aristocratic friends obviously feel that government must protect their privileged status but will decry and blast any notion that government should also protect those Americans who are less fortunate.

Now there are musings in some GOP circles to introduce a bill when Congress meets again to compel all Americans to pay some income tax no matter their ability to do so while there is never any statement, only silence, about having those who pay no payroll tax (the working-Americans’ tax) to contribute any Social Security and Medicare taxes. And there certainly is never a discussion in the GOP about enabling working Americans to receive wages high enough to be liable for income taxes.

And there is hardly ever any mention in Congress (Sen. Bernie Sanders excepted) to get the real moochers that pay no taxes to start ponying up their fair share. That would be dozens of corporations that pay nothing on hundred of billions of dollars in profits; many actually getting checks from the Treasury in addition to their freeloading. Also in this class would be hundreds of corporations that have special provisions that allow their taxes to be in the low single digits and lightly taxed or untaxed corporations whose primary source of income is doing business with the government, mainly with the Pentagon.

How else should we expect Republicans to act?


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The author is a retired newspaper editor and former intelligence analyst at the National Security Agency defending America from communism and other external threats. His latest book is “Saving America: Using Democratic Capitalism to Rescue the Nation from Economic Folly.”