The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the comments, which were made by Romney during a fundraiser, consisted of the governor stating that 47 percent of Americans would automatically vote for President Obama because they were "dependent" on the government and paid no federal income taxes.
As far as the number of Americans benefiting from entitlement programs, the Census Bureau reports that 49% of Americans in the second quarter of 2011 lived in a household where at least one member received a government benefit - which is up from 44.4% in the third quarter of 2008.
The numbers are broken down as follows:
• 26.4% of U.S. households had someone enrolled in Medicaid (the health-care program for low-income Americans)
• 16.2% of households had at least one member receiving Social Security.
• 15.8% lived in a household receiving food stamps
• 14.9% had a member with Medicare benefits
• 4.5% of households received assistance with their rent
• 1.7% had a member receiving unemployment benefits.
These numbers represent an enormous increase in government transfers over the last fifty years. The Daily Caller reports that Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute found that fifty years ago, government transfers totaled $24 billion in current dollars. In 2010, the number was nearly 100 times as large.
“Even after adjusting for inflation and population growth,” writes Eberstadt, “entitlement transfers to individuals have grown 727% over the past half-century.”
As for the number of people who pay no federal income tax at all, this number has also grown dramatically over the last five decades, from 23.7 percent in 1962 to 49.5 percent in 2009.
A Heritage Foundation study details how local churches and community-based charities once provided assistance to people in need. “Today, Social Security and other government programs provide much or all of the income to low-income and indigent households,” they report.
“If the citizens’ representatives are elected by an increasing percentage of voters who pay no income tax, how long will it be before these representatives respond more to demands for yet more entitlements and subsidies from non-payers than to the pleas of taxpayers to exercise greater spending prudence?”
Even though the mainstream media is presenting Governor Romney's comments as a "gaffe", the facts prove that they are anything but.
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