The 47% Fiasco

This has been truly the week that was!!  Being a news junkie, I listened to and watched more than I really needed to.  After several days of analysis, replayed clips of Romney placing his gold foot squarely in his mouth and then Senator Obama discussing ‘redistribution’, three comments, I think, were absolute gems.

The first is that in just a few short years, my husband and I have gone from some of the youngest of The Greatest Generation, touted by Tom Brokaw as the generation that lived through the Great Depression and the Second World War, then simply got an education, paid for by the government either in the public education system, or the GI Bill, passed by Congress, to pay returning veterans to go to school and get good educations.  My brother earned his Doctor of Education on the GI Bill, and pretty much dedicated his life to teaching.  Although not on the GI Bill, my husband earned his PhD in Soil Physics, and because of his research, thousands of people in the Central Valley have clean water to drink, and he has helped other locations pro bono after he retired from the US Dept. of Agriculture.  But after WWII, we just simply got on with our lives.  No big deal.  It was somewhat of a shock, then to realize we had gone from such an elevated status to being ‘moochers’, feeling like victims, unwilling to take responsibility for our lives, which we thought we had been doing for the past 60 years.  But we have pensions and health insurance from the government, paid into by us for those 60 years, along with my Social Security and Medicare.  What slackers we have been without even knowing it.  At the ages of 82 and 83, I guess we had best go out and get jobs to satisfy the $50,000 a plate lunch (or was it dinner?) bunch.

The next comments that I have found hilarious except for their utter stupidity is the taking President Obama to task for calling for the ‘redistribution’ of resources.  Ever since Ronald Reagan, the sainted Teflon President, wealth has been being redistributed – up.  Every chart shows that the average income of wage earners has remained stagnant since he was President, an almost straight line across the bottom of the chart, while the incomes of the wealthy keep going up, and up, and up.  It seems to me that just like leeches, the top 2% are sucking the basic quality of life out of the bulk of the population to appease their own avarice.  Eugene Robinson, Washington Post, made the comment that the 47% video was a call that, “We have to stop coddling the servants”.  Right on, Mr. Robinson!  And another pundit remarked that the word ‘redistribution’ is code for, “Those black people are after your stuff!”

The third observation, made by Krystal Ball, on The Cycle, was actually a question.  She asked who the most powerful person in the world is at this moment.  Not the Koch Brothers, Sheldon Adelson, or any of the other fat cats.  The most powerful person in the world is the worker, for minimum wage, no doubt, who took the 47% video!  Now this worker maybe set the cell phone hoping to record something he could sell.  The reason why is irrelevant.  He took it, then had the good sense to take it to Mother Jones who checked both the person setting up the phone, and the video itself to verify its accuracy.  Perhaps he or she was a student making a few extra bucks working the party.  Only Mother Jones knows and they aren’t talking.  But this action only goes to show that the most prosaic, mundane action in the world can have powerful effects.  It reinforces the fact that anyone of us, all of us, are important.  No one is any more important than anyone else.  We are all God’s children, and any one of us can make a terrific difference in this world by our actions.  Together we can change this world for the better.

Perhaps the saddest part of Romney’s blurt was that he believes a person’s worth is measured by whether they pay income taxes or not.  Don’t pay any attention to what a person does with his or her life.  Don’t pay any attention to whether they make a positive difference in anyone else’s life, however small.  Don’t pay any attention to anything else but making lots and lots of money.  Is this what the once Grand Old Party has fallen to?  Total inconsistency in the message, to wit., you are only successful if you make a lot of money and can avoid paying income taxes by parking your money elsewhere, and you are a total failure if you don’t make enough money to pay income taxes. 

This whole thing has gotten so ridiculous that it is impossible to make sense of any of it.