Last updated on February 8th, 2013 at 11:54 am
On Face The Nation, Factchecker in Chief Bill Clinton destroyed Mitt Romney’s claim that the 47% are victims with history and facts about working class Americans.
Here is the video from Face The Nation:
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Bob Schieffer asked Clinton if Romney’s 47% comments were smart politics.
The former president answered,
No, but it’s interesting. You know, I know a lot of higher income people. A lot of whom help me do my work, and they’re supporting Gov. Romney, and a lot of people say things like that. But I think it’s worth pointing out, if you look at that 47%. First, they do pay taxes. They pay Social Security taxes. They pay Medicare taxes. They pay state and local taxes.
Second, they are out of the federal income tax pool for two reasons. One is the economic crash, which lowered a lot people’s incomes. Even a lot of the newer jobs don’t pay high incomes. Now, the second reason is interesting. It’s a bipartisan reason in the past. It’s because the combined impacts of the Earned Income Tax Credit, and the Child Tax Credit. I doubled the Earned Income Tax Credit, which I think President Ford signed into law, and which President Reagan supported. And it’s refundable, if you work and you got kids and your income’s low, the government will actually refund the credit if you drop out of owing income tax. It was designed to support working families.
Then we put in a Child Tax Credit, which when President Bush passed all of those tax cuts that’s what he did for middle class people. He doubled the Child Tax Credit to a thousand dollars. Then when President Obama came in, and he had a Democratic Congress, and the economy was reeling, they increased the Earned Income Tax Credit so you could get a little more if you had more than three kids. So an enormous number of these people who were dropped out were dropped out for reasons of work and family, not dependents. These people are working their hearts out. They would love to make enough money to pay federal income tax. We were all before trying to help them with their work and their child rearing.
Schieffer asked former President Clinton if Romney understood who he was talking about, and he answered, “I don’t know. Because, you know the primary they ran kept pushing them all to the right. I remember when they all raised their hands and said would you oppose the budget, a new budget, if it had ten dollars in spending cuts for every one dollar of tax increase, and every one of them said, yeah, I’d be against that. So they got pushed further and further, and further out there, and I think you know, you don’t just purge all that out of your system when you start running for the general election.”
If you read between the lines, President Clinton was telling America that Romney is just another member of the super rich and his comments about the forty seven percent are what a lot of wealthy Republicans believe. Clinton showed the difference between a leader who understands who the working class of America are, and a candidate who has absolutely no clue.
Either Romney has no idea about the role former Republican presidents Ford, Reagan, and George W. Bush playing in cutting taxes for a group of people that he labeled victims, or maybe he does know, and that’s why his tax plan has to eliminate a lot of deductions the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit. Romney could very well believe that the moochers don’t deserve the EITC or Child Tax Credit.
Bill Clinton used history and facts to show Mitt Romney and everyone on the right who shares his beliefs how wrong they are about nearly half the country.
The giant contradiction in all of this is that Romney claims to value work, but he doesn’t want to reward Americans for working hard and taking care of their families. Mitt Romney has no clue what it is like to be middle class or a member of the working poor in this country. As evidenced by his own remarks, he appears to be absolutely clueless as to who half the country is and what their daily lives are like.
Mitt Romney is running for president based on a country club ideology that looks down on everyone who isn’t rich. Romney seems to believe that by virtue of their wealth, the super rich are superior human beings. This attitude leads one to believe that Romney isn’t running a presidential campaign. He’s engaging in a hostile takeover.
President Obama and the Democrats still feel your pain. Mitt Romney and the Republicans think you are a deadbeat.
If this is part of the argument that Bill Clinton is going to take to voters on behalf of President Obama, Mitt Romney is in a world of trouble.
Jason is the managing editor. He is also a White House Press Pool and a Congressional correspondent for PoliticusUSA. Jason has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science. His graduate work focused on public policy, with a specialization in social reform movements.
Awards and Professional Memberships
Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association
