Who are the 47%?

We’re all makers and takers

By Ravi Agrawal, CNN

Editor’s note: Ravi Agrawal is a senior producer on Fareed Zakaria’s Global Public Square. The views expressed are his own. You can follow him on Twitter @RaviAgrawalCNN

It all began, as things so often do these days, with a leaked video. Then there was a hurriedly-arranged press conference, an ensuing media maelstrom, and finally, attack ads.

Mitt Romney’s revelation that his “job is not to worry” about the “47 percent of the people” who “pay no income tax” has divided America. On the one hand, the 47 percent of households who pay no income tax are enraged, belittled. “People want a hand up, not a hand out,” says President Barack Obama. But assuming Romney understood his audience at that fateful fundraiser, his comments suggest the 53 percent are angry too: weary of contributing what they think is more than a fair share, and worried that if their man loses they’ll have to pay more. As columnist David Brooks put it, it’s the makers versus the moochers.

I’ve been struck by how surprised people are that nearly half of Americans don’t pay income tax. Why so many, ask the 53 percent. What happened?

If only America looked at the rest of the world.

Consider India. If you’re a taxpayer, you’re part of the elite few. In fact, only 2.8 percent of the population officially makes more than the $3,700 threshold for paying taxes (per capita income is only a third of that amount.) The rest – the 97.2 percent – don’t file an income tax return.

Or consider communist China. How many of its 1.34 billion citizens pay income taxes? According to the state-run Xinhua newspaper, only 24 million made the cut this year. By my math, that’s 1.72 percent of the population; 98.28 percent of Chinese don’t pay taxes!

Between India and China, that’s a third of all humanity. And I could go on. The numbers for the U.S. and China and India aren't directly comparable – the U.S. number is for households, while the others are for individuals. But the fact remains that in much of the world – across Asia, Africa, and South America – it turns out that not paying income tax is not unusual; paying taxes is unusual.

The American 53 percent should be happy there are so many shoulders to carry the load.

The fact is that Romney’s comments suggest a number of misconceptions that are stoking resentment and contributing to the creation of a class fault-line across America.

First, are federal services used exclusively by the people who don’t pay income taxes? A fascinating article in the New York Times shows why that’s not true. It points to a Cornell University survey that asked Americans whether they had taken advantage of federal government programs like student loans or Medicare (it doesn’t take into account government programs that impact everyone, like the police or the highway system). Ninety-six percent admitted to seeking federal assistance. Young adults not eligible for many of these services accounted for the other 4 percent.

In some form or the other, we are all takers; every single one of us. It’s not just government programs; look at subsidies. In the U.S. for example, a gallon of gasoline costs nearly $4. But you would pay twice as much in most of Europe. Even the Indians and Chinese pay more. Doesn’t everyone benefit from subsidies?
In an excellent essay for TIME, meanwhile, Michael Grunwald – a tax payer – outlines how every single thing his family uses would cost more were it not for subsidies: water, electricity, food, even public radio.
Second, let’s flip this around. Just as we are all takers, we are all makers too. Everyone – rich and poor – contributes. There are payroll taxes, property taxes, Social Security and Medicaid taxes. The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein points out that even the poorest fifth of Americans pay on average about 17.4 percent of their incomes on these taxes. A majority of Americans end up paying 25 to 30 percent of their income – more than Mitt Romney likely does, as Klein points out.

The shared burden holds true for other parts of the world, too – places far more unequal than America.
We tend to think of income tax as a burden. Perhaps we should see it as a privilege, a luxury to have an income level that makes us eligible to pay it. Look around the world and you’ll see that income tax payers are part of an elite club. More people want into this club than out. Perhaps that’s what fuels resentment on both sides. In creating arbitrary numbers that divide those who pay taxes and those who don’t, we rank people. And yet, everyone makes, everyone takes. Perhaps the system just needs a gentler touch: an all-encompassing income-tax curve. But try getting that through Congress…

Why don't we hear about this in the Liberal Press in America?

This article from today's Guardian -

Veterans' bill voted down by GOP as Senate Democrats proclaim 'new low'

Democrats fall two votes short of passing bill that would help unemployed veterans amid accusations GOP played politics

Harry Reid, the majority leader of the Senate, said the bill had met 'one Republican stall tactic after another'. Photograph: Harry Hamburg/AP

Republicans have voted down legislation that would have established a $1bn jobs programme to put unemployed veterans back to work as firefighters and police officers and in public work projects.
They objected to the cost of the bill, which they said violated spending limits agreed to last year in Congress.
Democrats and veterans groups say its cost are fully offset.
The bill, which had bipartisan support in the Senate and would have given priority to post-9/11 veterans whose employment prospects are three points below the national average, fell two votes short of the majority of 60 needed to waive Republican objections.
After the vote, at midday on Wednesday, Patty Murray, chairman of the Senate veterans affairs committee, accused Senate Republicans of "shocking and shameful" obstructive politics.
She said: "At a time when one in four young veterans are unemployed, Republicans should have been able, for just this once, to put aside the politics of obstruction and to help these men and women provide for their families.
"It's unbelievable that even after more than a decade of war many Republicans still will not acknowledge that the treatment of our veterans is a cost of war. Today they voted down a fully paid-for bill that included bipartisan ideas to put veterans in jobs that will allow them to serve their communities. Jobs that would have helped provide veterans with the self-esteem that is so critical to their successful transition home."
Murray said the bill had been extensively rewritten to include amendments by Republicans – eight of the 12 provisions in the bill were Republican-originated ideas. She said that the bill had even incorporated most of the provisions of a competing Republican bill, but to no avail.
Democratic senator Bill Nelson of Florida, the bill's lead sponsor, said: "[With] a need so great as unemployed veterans, this is not the time to draw a technical line on the budget."
Republicans said they agreed with the sentiment to help veterans but said the bill was flawed.
Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma said the federal government already had six job-training programs for veterans and there was no way to monitor how well they were working. He said that the way forward was not to increase debt.
"We ought to do nothing now that makes the problem worse for our kids and grandkids," Coburn told the Associated Press.
Supporters modeled their proposal partly after the Civilian Conservation Corp used during the Great Depression to employ people to build parks and build dams.
A handful of Republicans joined with Democrats in voting to waive the objection to the bill: senator Scott Brown of Massachusetts, Dean Heller of Nevada, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Maine's Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe. The Democrats needed a vote of 60 to go forward with the bill but the final vote was 58 to 40.
"After everything our veterans have done for us, the least we can do is make sure they are afforded every opportunity to thrive here at home," Heller said.
Minutes before the vote, Murray gave an impassioned speech from the floor, asking for unity to pass the bill which she said "should not be killed by procedural games".
The vote, postponed from last week because of Republican opposition, was the latest in a series of delays which have hampered the bill's progress. Members of the House are preparing to leave Washington to campaign on their re-election.
The Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America described the vote as a "huge disappointment".
Ramsay Sulayman, of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, said he was saddened to see "a very small group of people that are standing for principle to block the bill from even coming to a vote" on an issue like veteran jobs, which has seen a strong spirit of bipartisan support.
"That's what we object to. If people say 'We don't like the bill' and stand up and get up and vote and go on the record ... that is different. It's sad to see a few people holding a bill to hostage."
The jobs bill is based on a proposal in President Barack Obama's state of the union address in January.
Harry Reid, the majority leader of the Senate, said the bill had met "one Republican stall tactic after another", in a post to his Twitter account last week. He said the tactics marked a "new low" for Republicans.
Jeff Sessions, the Senate Budget Committee ranking member, said he objected to the bill on the grounds it would increase the veterans affairs department budget and would blow though the spending cap lawmakers agreed last year.
Democrats argue the bills costs are already covered by plans to collect more than half a billion in unpaid taxes over the next five years, according to the Washington Examiner.
The bill was held up in the Senate last week after filibustering by Rand Paul, the Republican Senator for Kentucky, to gain support for a Pakistani doctor who helped locate Osama Bin Laden.
Paul has promised to block Senate action until the doctor, Shakil Afridi, is released from jail. The Pakistani government has said it will not release him. Paul has also called on the Obama administration to cut foreign aid to Pakistan until Afridi is released.
Unemployment for the newest generation of veterans, post 9/11, rose to 10.9% in August, a stark contrast to the nation's unemployment rate of 8.1% in the same month. Veterans commonly find work after service in federal, state and local government jobs, a vulnerable sector in the current economy.
Younger veterans are especially vulnerable to unemployment after deployment. Around 20% of 18-24-year-old veterans are unemployed.

The Big Lie Part Two: Obama

I admit that I watched and read far more about the RNC in Tampa than I have the DNC in Charlotte because, frankly, the Sideshow madness of the current Republican Party is far more entertaining. Like going to Flea Markets in small country towns, the Human Condition is both grotesque and tender at the same time.

Clearly, Mr. Muslim Obama America-Hater was in for a bashing at this carnival and, naturally, no one pulled any punches. The theme was present in the gleeful misquoting of the president as a backdrop to the show: We Built This. Even those who pretend, for dramatic reasons, to misunderstand what Mr. Obama was saying (the entire infrastructure of a nation that created a context for entrepreneurs to be successful was built by everyone and paid for by taxes). And Mr. Ryan didn't disappoint either. He took a while to get going and build a head of steam that might carry him past his awkwardness of following a charismatic speaker like Rubio, but he found his pace and hit it:

• Obama robbed Medicare (which Ryan knows to be not true because he has written the same numbers into a succession of his own budgets as a way to continue Medicare's solvency).
• Obama didn't lift a finger to maintain the GM plant in Ryan's homestate despite promising to do otherwise (hilarious because the plant Ryan is describing closed before Obama came into the White House as any check of the facts will show. And funnier still, go back and look at Romney's Op-Ed piece in the NYT about letting plants like that die for the good of the Market).
• "[Obama] created a bipartisan debt commission. They came back with an urgent report. He thanked them, sent them on their way and then did exactly nothing." (Well now, Mr. Ryan, you know that's not true because you sat on that bipartisan commission and know full well that it died because you and two Republicans refused to support it. Lovely attempt to shift the blame).

That last bullet point is worth noting. As you may remember, 2008 began with America mired in two extremely expensive and tragic wars, the economy was in the worst crisis since the Great Depression and America's place on the world stage, which had started off post 9/11 with immense positive soft power, was so mired in disaster that China and Iran were stronger than ever. George Bush, through his ill-advised adventure in Iraq actually made the Axis of Evil stronger. America was in a bad way, but not so bad that we couldn't rally and climb back to the top, because that's what America does. If we all pitch in . . .

Except . . .Senate Minority leader Mitch McConnell got the ball rolling by laying down the primary goal for the Republican Party: "The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president." In other words, if it came down to bipartisanship to save America's economy and standing on the international stage, or partisanship to prevent Obama from ever looking successful the Republican plan was clear: they would take the Low Road of partisanship.

And if you're being honest, you'll note that the last three years have been a stark and nearly hysterical attempt to create gridlock in Congress in order to jeopardize the administration. We've seen it over and over again to the point where America's credit rating was downgraded for the first time in history from AAA to AA + over the absurdism of allowing the temporary Bush Tax Cuts - created in a time before the economy crashed - to expire and raising the Debt Ceiling - something Reagan did eighteen times. It was a cartoonish, adolescent game of brinksmanship that was easily avoided - Speaker of the House John Boehner was all about being noble and bipartisan and solving the problem -  in the beginning, before he was reigned in by Uber Leader, the unelected superlobbyist Grover Nordquist. Suddenly Boehner pulled back from bipartisanship and began playing Playground Tough Guy.

And the economy teetered ever closer to disaster.

The fact that anything got done at all in this climate is remarkable and deserves to be counted as a success, but I don't want to go overboard.

So, Mitt Romney, let's address the single biggest question you raised during your tepid, bloodless speech: Are We Better Off Now? According to most indicators, the answer is Yes. According to The Economist's Report Card:

"Did Mr Obama blow it? Nearly four years later, voters seem to think so: approval of his economic management is near rock-bottom, the single-biggest obstacle to his re-election. This, however, is not a fair judgment on Mr Obama’s record, which must consider not just the results but the decisions he took, the alternatives on offer and the obstacles in his way. Seen in that light, the report card is better. His handling of the crisis and recession were impressive. Unfortunately, his efforts to reshape the economy have often misfired. And America’s public finances are in a dire state."

Looking at Obama's record in the face of the disasters facing our economy, we can see that

• a bank crisis that threatened to destroy us was offset by TARP bailouts which have been almost completely paid back, and the crisis averted.
• two massive employers Chrysler and GM were ushered into bankruptcy then provide the financing necessary to reorganise, on condition that both eliminated unneeded capacity and workers. Both companies emerged from bankruptcy within a few months. Chrysler, now part of Italy’s Fiat, is again profitable, as is GM, which returned to the stockmarket in 2010.
• a stimulus that nonpartisan assessors see as saving or creating 3.4m jobs
• one disasterous, illegal and unethical war over and done with
• Osama Bin Laden dead and the war in Afghanistan winding down
• and unemployment numbers that are back up to nearly where they were before the crash. 

 Really - in comparison with the where we were in 2008 vs. where we are now - yes, we are better off. We're not in The Best Possible Place, but we are no longer on the brink of disaster. You did your job, you didn't blow it. That's not enough to recommend a president for a further term, but it's certainly commendable.

George W. Bush - now he blew it. There's almost no standard you can judge the previous president  by without finding failure and ineptitude and missed opportunity. He had eight years and when he was done we were looking up out of a pretty deep hole. Do you remember that?

Obama is, at best and worst, a mediocre president. He didn't blow it and, in a lot of ways he kept us from sinking.

We survived eight years of Bush - I reckon eight years of Obama won't be too bad.

The Big Lie Part One: Bush

"All this was inspired by the principle - which is quite true in itself - that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying."

Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf

From year to year I contemplate whether or not I want to continue teaching The Tragedy of Julius Caesar to my sophomore Honors classes. Shakespearean drama based on Ancient Rome, written in Elizabethan blank verse, does not combine into a sure sell to teenagers who would rather parse the language down to its struts and pylons rather than savor it in it's purest uncut form. Then I read the newspaper and Facebook and hear Talk Radio and I realize that, Yes, indeed - this is important stuff. 

One of the central themes to the play, in my opinion, is how vulnerable people are in the face of information manipulation - what the political writers refer to as spin. Whether it's Cassius seducing Brutus to lead an assassination of Caesar, or Mart Antony seducing the plebians at Caesar's funeral, the real protagonist of the play is Spin, which makes people chose against their own best interests to fulfill an end planned by someone with no altruistic goal. 

Believe it or not, I'm no big Obama supporter. I am proudly registered at my polling place as an Independent. Oh, sure, I was seduced by the promise of Mr. Obama early on and excited by all that his election presented. But politics more often than not is a meatgrinder for saviors and charlatans alike. And Mr. Obama, like so many of his predecessors, is neither: he walks the broadway of mediocrity.

Therefore, what disturbs me the most these days is being forced into a corner where I feel a need to defend the president. I've got nothing against him at all, but I'm also not one of his cheerleaders. Yet time and time again I feel pushed onto the stump to defend him against the storm of detractors who attack him and his record in increasingly hysterical and illogical ways that stun and repel and disgust me, which puts me squarely in the eye of the storm. Everyone I know and come into contact with, all those "friends" on Facebook, are militantly in the Other Camp - which is fine. But somehow I've become the poster boy for Defending the President, which not a role I take to naturally. I voted for him, yes. But that's all. As a Mad-Dog Moderate he doesn't reflect my politics any better than anyone else does these days.

Still, here I am, and this is why: in the Year of Our Lord, 2008, the casket was nailed shut on what was arguably the worst presidency of all time. George W.'s record was so toxic that even now, when the Democrats are on the ropes and history has been smudged and fudged, W. was conspicuously absent from the RNC in Tampa. His brother - the one-time superstar of the Republican Party, Jeb Bush, was not even a candidate despite being seen years ago as a particularly powerful contender. His only role in Tampa this August seemed to be as an angry man, the last Torchbearer left for W. His speech was memorable only as a clumsy attempt to paint his brother a little less harshly for posterity.

And that's a hell of a task. Let's go back to the eight years of Bushism in 2008 when W. limped away into obscurity as "One of the least popular and most divisive presidents in American history. At home, his approval rating has been stuck in the 20s for months; abroad, George Bush has presided over the most catastrophic collapse in America's reputation since the second world war. The American economy is in deep recession, brought on by a crisis that forced Mr Bush to preside over huge and unpopular bail-outs" - in the words of The Economist, hardly a banner waving member of the Liberal Media. The Economist for those of you unfamiliar with it is a Business and Market friendly publication that is solidly conservative, and which had no issues originally endorsing W. In addition, it is a British publication and thus is able to take a much longer view of American politics than somebody nostril deep in the muck.

A quick review of the eight years of Bushism reads like a sitcom of disaster and incompetence: he entered the White House with the government holding it's first budget surplus in decades, which he threw away in ill-advised tax cuts that fell heavily on the wealthiest Americans and then by funding two simultaneous wars. By the time he was done the government was deeply in debt.

In the words of even friendly, conservative journalists, "the three most notable characteristics of the Bush presidency: partisanship, politicisation and incompetence. Mr Bush was the most partisan president in living memory. He was content to be president of half the country—a leader who fused his roles of head of state and leader of his party. He devoted his presidency to feeding the Republican coalition that elected him."

In fact, the Bush presidency, in more ways than one - with a nod towards that old jedi master of partisanship, Newt Gingrich - sowed the seeds of Government Gridlock that haunts us to this day. Again, according to The Economist: "Relentless partisanship led to the politicisation of almost everything Mr Bush did. He used his first televised address to justify putting strict limits on federal funding for stem-cell research, and used the first veto of his presidency to prevent the expansion of that funding. He appointed two “strict constructionist” judges to the Supreme Court, John Roberts and Samuel Alito, turned his back on the Kyoto protocol, dismissed several international treaties, particularly the anti-ballistic-missile treaty, loosened regulations on firearms and campaigned against gay marriage. His energy policy was written by Mr Cheney with the help of a handful of cronies from the energy industry."

"The Iraq war was a case study of what happens when politicisation is mixed with incompetence. A long-standing convention holds that politics stops at the ocean's edge. But Mr Bush and his inner circle labelled the Democrats “Defeaticrats” whenever they were reluctant to support extending the war from Afghanistan to Iraq. They manipulated intelligence to demonstrate that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and had close relations with al-Qaeda. This not only divided a country that had been brought together by September 11th; it also undermined popular support for what Mr Bush regarded as the central theme of his presidency, the war on terror.

"Sean Wilentz, a historian at Princeton, remarks how unusual it is for a president to have politicised such a national catastrophe: “No other president—Lincoln in the civil war, FDR in world war two, John F. Kennedy at critical moments of the cold war—faced with such a monumental set of military and political circumstances, failed to embrace the opposing political party to help wage a truly national struggle. But Bush shut out and even demonised the Democrats.”

"The invasion of Iraq was like much else in the Bush years—an initial triumph that contained the seeds of disaster."

My point here, in documenting the massive failures of the Bush years - and I've only scratched the surface - is that many of those howling about Mr. Obama remained silent and, through their silence, indicated their satisfaction and support for those disastrous policies of George W. Bush. If you remained quiet and complacent from 2001-2008 and then suddenly reared up in Righteous Rage against Obama then I'm calling you out.

I don't want to defend Obama because I've tried to maintain neutrality. But really - where is all this sputtering tea party rebellion coming from? Where was it for eight years previous? If you didn't post raging, frothing I Hate the Government posts on Facebook then, if you didn't rage and scream and roll your eyes around at the excesses of Little Big Government Bushism and ruinous fiscal and foreign policy during that administration then I'm calling you out. You are myopically partisan and your views are frighteningly one-sided.