Mitt Romney calls half of America freeloaders

[Rudeboyelvis]

The assessment that 47% of Americans don't pay taxes is absolutely nothing but shear demagoguery designed to appeal to the far-right and of course the tax evaders that have enjoyed govt sanctioned bailouts in the masquerading of "tax cuts" for over 12 years.

Romney's headline assertion that 47% of Americans pay no income tax is almost correct, assuming he was referring to federal income tax. The Tax Policy Centre said that in 2011 46.4% of people paid no federal income tax. But his suggestion that such people do not "take personal responsibility and care for their lives" warrants further investigation.

Firstly, some of those people who did not pay income tax still paid payroll taxes, for social security and Medicare, so that it was only 18.1% of households that did not pay any income or payroll taxes. Given that there are sales taxes, state property taxes and state income taxes these people are still paying some tax – at what point you are deemed to be taking personal responsibility is subjective.

Of the 18.1% paying no income or payroll taxes, more than half (10.3% of all households) were elderly, so retired people who may well have paid income and payroll taxes, as well as others, during their working lives. Of the remainder, 6.9% of all households did not pay income or payroll taxes, essentially because they were poor, leaving 1% of "others" who did not pay either of these two types of taxes. Presumably, within the "others" category would fall the likes of six of the 400 US tax filers in 2009 with the highest adjusted gross income (at least $77m), who, according to Internal Revenue Service studies, paid no US income tax, and the 19,551 US households with income above $200,000 who owed no US or foreign income tax.

The percentage of people paying no federal income tax was even higher in 2008 and 2009 (50.8% in each of those years) but it is no coincidence that such figures have gone up during a recession (the figure was 39.9% in 2007).

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012...?newsfeed=true