Who are Romney's 47 Percent?

In my last post I discussed how, earlier this month, Mitt Romney made big news when a video recording released by Mother Jones magazine showed him disdainfully dismissing the 47 percent of the American people who do not pay federal income tax.  Romney told a small gathering of wealthy donors he feels "it's not my job to worry about" such people who "think of themselves as victims" and who "have no concern for their own lives."  Romneys' remarks created a furor by expressing the commonly held conservative view that a huge proportion of the American people are lazy moochers living off the hard work of the rest.  Today in the blog I will present the numbers on who these 47 percent really are.

See the pie chart below.  This is reprinted from BusinessInsider.com, though you can find it in many other reputable places as well.   As you can see, 46.4 percent do not pay federal income tax, making


Romney's 47 percent figure only a slight exaggeration.  Of that number, almost all of them were not paying income tax because they are either old or poor.  Most of the non payers (28.3%) are employed and are paying federal withholding tax for Social Security and Medicare.  The next largest group (10.3%) are senior citizens, most of them on Social Security.   A smaller slice (6.9%) is made up of people earning less than $20,000.  These working poor are frequently part of the Earned Income Tax Credit, a bipartisan program passed with considerable Republican support to make sure gainful employment pays more than "welfare" in order to get people off public assistance.  Only a tiny fraction (0.9%) are those who do not pay income taxes and are neither elderly nor poor.  And some of these, (an estimated 35,000 in 2009), were not stereotypical "poor moochers" but more like rich avoiders, people earning over $200,000 who took advantage of shelters and deductions to avoid paying.

As often occurs with conservative scapegoat references, the facts and numbers simply do not substantiate Mitt Romney's erroneously skewed stereotypical references.  Sadly, I have seldom seen the truth  persuade people of his world view to change their biased preconceptions.  For those of you amenable to reason, however, you now have the facts to refute the common plutocratic and Tea Party picture of what nearly half the American people are like.