Editorial: Romney's 47 percenters blur facts, message

In his now-famous video clip criticizing the 47 percenters, the rough share of people who pay no federal income taxes, Mitt Romney raises some legitimate points.

LM Otero, AP

Mickey Corsi protests outside a Romney fundraiser in Dallas on Tuesday.

LM Otero, AP

Mickey Corsi protests outside a Romney fundraiser in Dallas on Tuesday.

The nation's tax code does let too many people off the hook, undermining the sense that Americans are all in this together. And the many federal entitlement programs do threaten to create an unaffordable culture of dependency.

But as is too often the case with the Republican presidential candidate, he muddles things up. He confuses the 47% who pay no income taxes with the 49% who get government benefits. And he conflates both groups with supporters of President Obama. In fact, the three groups overlap only in parts, like rings of the Olympic logo.

Those who pay no federal income taxes are not made up exclusively of those Romney derides as dependent on government and lacking in personal responsibility. They include millions of senior citizens and low-skilled workers who consider themselves neither victims nor entitled to anything.

Government benefits are heavily skewed towards seniors, nearly all of whom paid Social Security and Medicare taxes for decades to earn them. Judging by the polls, both they and low-income workers are likely to give Romney respectable levels of support in November, unless they feel he is insulting them or cannot relate to their situation — the issue that turned Romney's remarks white hot.

In surreptitiously taped comments at a May fundraising event, leaked Monday by the liberal magazine Mother Jones, Romney plays to his donors' prejudices to sell a message that the Democratic Party is about dependency and the Republican Party is about free enterprise and limited government.

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In reality, the number of people who pay income tax dropped largely because of the recession and tax cuts approved during Republican administrations. And Republicans defend many of the $1 trillion in annual tax expenditures -- deductions, credits and loopholes -- that represent another form of entitlements.

But what might be most troubling about Romney's strivers-vs.-moochers formulation is how he unnecessarily personalized a debate that should be about policy. Rather than criticizing a string of laws that has shielded too many adults from the obligation of paying federal income taxes, he disparages the non-payers themselves — apparently for the sin of complying with the law.

That presents a rich irony, because Romney has defended his own low tax rates (of 14% on $21.6 million in 2010, much less than the top rate of 35%) by saying that he was fully in compliance with the law, and that Americans should pay only what's required.

Inevitably, Romney's comments are being compared to Obama's in 2008, when he was taped saying that some voters not likely to vote for him "cling to their guns or religion." You'd think, after that experience, candidates wouldn't say things at closed fundraisers that they wouldn't say in public. At least Obama knew that he committed a huge gaffe and said he had misspoken. Romney keeps doubling down on his mistake, pushing a kind of resentment politics.

If Romney wants to end a psychology of entitlement, here's a better way to start: Propose a detailed tax simplification that strips out giveaways. That would include those that enable his own loophole-ridden rate and a raft of middle-class goodies such as the mortgage interest deduction, in the process of ending the free ride for a chunk of the 47%.

The principle should be that everyone above the poverty level should have at least a minimal stake in financing the nation's defense, highways, national parks and other needs -- with the burden distributed in the simplest, fairest, most efficient way possible.

Far more important, though, is bringing runaway benefit programs under control. Here Romney and his running mate, Paul Ryan, have made some constructive proposals. But their arguments would be far more effective if they'd put forth a vision that unites Americans to overcome a common threat rather than playing to stereotypes that divide them.

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Mixed Message as Republicans Claim Health Law Cuts Medicare

Yet since the Supreme Court upheld the Democrats’ 2010 health care law, Republicans, led by Mitt Romney, have reversed tactics and attacked the president and Democrats in Congress by saying that Medicare will be cut too much as part of that law. Republicans plan to hold another vote to repeal the law in the House next week, though any such measure would die in the Democratic-controlled Senate.

“Obamacare cuts Medicare — cuts Medicare — by approximately $500 billion,” Mr. Romney has told audiences.

That is a reprise of Republicans’ mantra of the 2010 midterm elections, which gave them big gains at both the state and federal levels and a majority in the House. Yet the message conflicts not only with their past complaint that Democrats opposed reining in Medicare spending, but also with the fact that House Republicans have voted twice since 2010 for the same 10-year, $500 billion savings in supporting Mr. Ryan’s annual budgets.

The result is a messaging mess, even by the standards of each party’s usual election-year attacks that the other is being insufficiently supportive of older people’s benefits.

And in this year’s contests, which both parties describe as a referendum on who can best correct the nation’s economic course, such talk underscores how far Republicans and Democrats are from truly squaring with the public about curbing the growth of the major entitlement programs: Medicare, Medicaid and, to a lesser extent, Social Security. That growth is driving the projections of a federal debt that is mounting unsustainably as the population ages and health care costs rise.

“A pox on both their houses,” said Ron Haskins, a former Congressional staff member who is now a scholar of social programs and budgeting at the Brookings Institution. Democrats and Republicans “know they have to do something about Medicare, and then they harass each other about cutting Medicare. It’s so discouraging to me, but I’m a Republican, so I’m much more distraught about Republicans.”

And, Mr. Haskins added, “$500 billion is modest compared to what Ryan would do.”

Under Mr. Ryan’s budget, which Mr. Romney has supported but which has been blocked each year in the Senate, Medicare would not pay for the medical fees of future beneficiaries, as it currently does. Instead it would provide “premium support,” limited payments — vouchers, Democrats say — that beneficiaries could use to buy insurance policies in the private sector. And Medicaid, which increasingly goes toward nursing home care for older people, would become a capped block grant to states, forcing them to make significant cuts.

In their attacks, Republicans have said in speeches and in television advertisements that the Democrats’ projected $500 billion in Medicare savings will “strip,” “gut,” “rob” or “raid” older people’s benefits.

“Ron Barber will hurt Arizona seniors,” said an ad this spring from the House Republicans’ campaign committee in support of the Republican who ultimately lost to Mr. Barber, a Democrat, in a special election to replace Representative Gabrielle Giffords.

Objecting to such attacks, Representative Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, the senior Democrat on the House Budget Committee, said in an interview: “There are two issues here: One, there were no cuts to Medicare benefits. And in fact, benefits were strengthened.”

Independent fact-checking groups have repeatedly knocked down the Republicans’ claims. “A discredited claim is making a comeback following the U.S. Supreme Court ruling upholding most of the national health care reform law,” PolitiFact recently wrote in one such analysis.

Republicans stand by their attack. They say the problem with the Democratic approach is that the reductions do little to bolster Medicare’s stability, with the money diverted to initiatives in the health care law.

“Democrats are still the only party in Washington to cut $500 billion from Medicare in order to help pay for Obamacare,” said Paul Lindsay, spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee. “It’s a fact that did not go unnoticed among seniors in 2010, and one that we will continue holding Democrats accountable for in our ads this fall.”

But the $500 billion in reductions would come through cuts in the projected growth of Medicare and would mainly affect hospitals and other providers of medical care, some of whom supported the health care measure nonetheless because it would extend coverage to up to 30 million uninsured Americans, raising the number of paying customers. Other savings would result from lower subsidies for private insurers selling Medicare Advantage plans, which offer older people extra features like vision care and gym memberships. The insurers could not cut basic Medicare benefits.

Democrats used the projected $500 billion in savings to help pay for expanding older people’s benefits. The health care law says that some preventive care services like mammograms must be free to patients, and it closed the “doughnut hole” in the Medicare prescription drug program, which had left many older people paying full price for prescriptions above a certain level.

While Republicans have backed the spending reductions, even as they have attacked Mr. Obama and the Democrats for enacting them, they would end the new benefits.

Mr. Ryan, of Wisconsin, was unavailable for comment, but, pressed on the issue on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday, he said: “Well, our budget keeps that money for Medicare to extend its solvency. What Obamacare does is it takes that money from Medicare to spend on Obamacare.”

Robert Greenstein, the executive director of the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, called Mr. Ryan’s claim “somewhere between a misstatement and a flat-out untruth.”

Mr. Greenstein, among others, said that Democrats were not double-counting the $500 billion in savings — by claiming that it both improves Medicare’s financial outlook and helps finance new benefits — any more than were the Republicans, who say they would use the savings both to shore up the Medicare trust funds and to reduce the federal debt.

The Congressional Budget Office and the chief actuary for the Medicare and Medicaid programs, Richard S. Foster, have concluded that the $500 billion in savings would extend the solvency of Medicare’s hospital insurance trust fund. Since the passage of the health care law, known as the Affordable Care Act, the Medicare trustees have shifted the projected date of insolvency to 2024 from 2016.

Mr. Foster, in this year’s report by the trustees, wrote that “the Affordable Care Act makes important changes to the Medicare program and substantially improves its financial outlook.”

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Democrats Hit Romney on 'Message of Wisconsin' Comments

Democrats sought to turn the tables on Mitt Romney Friday afternoon by seizing on comments he made in Iowa that suggested the country doesn’t need more firefighters, police or teachers.

Mr. Romney was responding to President Obama’s earlier remarks about the private economy’s being “fine.” In doing so, Mr. Romney dismissed Mr. Obama’s call for more aid to state and local governments.

“He wants another stimulus, he wants to hire more government workers,” Mr. Romney said of Mr. Obama. “He says we need more fireman, more policeman, more teachers. Did he not get the message of Wisconsin? The American people did. It’s time for us to cut back on government and help the American people.”

Democrats pounced on the comment, saying it proved that Mr. Romney would like to eliminate jobs for teachers, firefighters and police officers.

“Could Mitt Romney be any more disconnected from the concerns of middle-class Americans?” said R.T. Rybak, the vice chairman of the Democratic National Committee. “To suggest that police, firefighters and teachers aren’t helping the American people and aren’t vital to our communities shows that he has no clue what’s going on in the real world.”

Mr. Rybak added: “Mitt Romney’s assertion that the American people don’t benefit from firemen, policemen and teachers is so detached from reality I did a double take – I had to check twice to be sure he had actually said it.”

The rapid response team for the Democratic National Committee sent out numerous statements Friday afternoon, clearly intended to try to change the subject. Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, issued a statement echoing the party response.

“We knew Mitt Romney liked firing people, but we didn’t know that included firefighters and cops,” Mr. Schumer said. “Middle-class voters already distrust Mitt Romney for being out-of-touch and uncaring about regular folks. Bragging about wanting to give pink slips to first responders only cements that perception.”

Follow Michael D. Shear on Twitter at @shearm.

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