Excellent response. And the only correction I would make and its a small one is that it wasn't Romney who included the exact same savings in his budget. That was Paul Lyin' Ryan who included the exact same savings in his budget and Romney has endorsed it.

But you are absolutely right the $700 Billion figure is from eliminating fraud and waste. Not cuts to benefits.

Now notice how easy it is for us to answer that question while the brainwashed parrots and plastic bubble reactionaries will accuse President Obama of cutting medicare by $700 but when you ask them where that $700 billion is supposed to come from they just run away.

 

Has Romney ever said what he uses on his hair? I don't know if I ever saw it move-even in Tampa when the hurricane was close by. The stuff he uses is probably filled with freon, chloroflorohydrocarbons-all of the things that environmentalists want to ban. Maybe some liquid nitrogen to really hold it in place.

 

you are right it was ryan that proposed it and romney did endorse it
then romney stated that this was one of the sections of obamacare he would keep

 

Keep watching because Romney/Ryan changes their stories every day.

 

Forgive me for not knowing your political system as well as my own. I don't take an active interest in politics anywhere to be fair. I was misinformed on what romney had said. I have an interest in American economics because that influences in a big way our economy . I'm not sure I have ever claimed to know American politics or even British politics.

 

dave if you know not of which you speak isnt it better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and be proven a fool?
also lets look into that 47%
the # is correct 47% of americans do not pay income taxes
but in that 47% approximately 30% are social security or disability
mainly comprised of people that paid into the systems or were never able to pay into the systems
but what of that percentage is people that have never payed in?
what percentage are located in the districts of columbia that are not required to pay in but are allowed the benefits?????

also in that 47% are those that had incomes so low that they owed not taxes from what was taken from their paychecks

also lets look at the companies and individuals taking adveantages of loopholes and even tax releif programs to pay 10% of what they should owe








romney openly admits he has sheltered accounts that are not taxed yet he calls himself an american

 

Just a slight correction. If federal withholding taxes, social security, and FICA are counted as paying "federal income taxes" (which they most definitely are) then only 18% of Americans pay no federal income taxes.

 

​

 

Maybe you should follow your own advice.


Anyway. I never said what Romney said was right, I never even mentioned income tax. All I said was I don't think this will have any bearing on the outcome of the election.

I still haven't looked into what he said, or the statistics related to income tax, because it is too tediously boring for me to care. But, from what I can tell, Romney has had a go at the people who support Obama, and he has used false propaganda to back up his claims against those Obama supporters.

All I was implying was that by attacking people that are voting for Obama anyway, What is the worst that could happen? They vote for the person they already support? Maybe one or two republicans think "jesus, romney is unjustly saying bad things about those people who have different views from us, I better not vote for him now"

If he was attacking all people that don't pay taxes then there might be an issue, but I hear his comments were only directed to people voting for Obama.

 

MIAMI - Mitt Romney called the Republican Party the "natural home" for Hispanic voters, saying, in his first campaign rally in nearly five days, that America is a place that helps those struggling get back on their feet but won't make government dependency a "permanent lifestyle."
"This party is the natural home for Hispanic Americans," Romney said to cheers at a "Juntos con Romney" rally. It was Romney's first campaign event since leaked videos emerged of him speaking at a private fundraiser in May where he appeared to criticize 47 percent of Americans for considering themselves "victims" who feel "entitled" to government assistance.
Speaking through various interruptions, one protestor, getting no further than screaming "The 47 percent!," a reference to those leaked videos, Romney tried to paint a picture of a presidency that would do the best job of pulling Hispanics out of poverty.
To do that, Romney used the story of his own Mexican-born father as an example of someone who received government assistance but then made it on his own.
"I mentioned my dad, my dad was born in Mexico of Americans parents living there. At age 5 or 6 there was revolution," Romney said. "They came back to the United States, and my dad had to get help, financial help, the government helped his family be able to get on their feet again. By the way, that's the way America works, we have great hearts, we care for people who have needs. We help get them back. We help lift them up but then they go back to their permanent lifestyle."

http://news.yahoo.com/romney-uses-m...tory-juntos-020859809--abc-news-politics.html



this is interesting to hear from a candidate that wants to end the same programs that his own parents relied on

 

View attachment

 

The irony being that Republicans have ALWAYS advocated eliminating waste and fraud in the Medicare program. So when Obama does exactly that, they attack him in a way that suggests that he's cutting benefits to seniors.

I never saw a more flagrantly dishonest campaign in my life.

 

And while definitely have a few more elections under my belt than you do I still have to agree. I've never seen a candidate or a party try to base their entire campaign on easily provable lies.

 

During the campaign of 1980 Ronald Reagan said he could cut taxes, raise defense spending, and balance the budget by 1983 "if not sooner" without cutting popular middle class entitlements. All he would need to do would be to cut "waste, fraud, and abuse."

That was the most flagrantly dishonest campaign promise in my life. The delusion that we can have the government we want without paying for it continues to be a blight to political discussions in the United States.

In September 19, 2011 Gallup released a poll that indicated that, "Americans estimate that the federal government wastes 51 cents of every dollar it spends." If that delusion was true everyone's taxes could be cut in half with no loss to spending programs most Americans approve of.

http://www.gallup.com/poll/149543/americans-say-federal-gov-wastes-half-every-dollar.aspx

 

That depends on what constitutes as "waste". I'm sure many people think a $700bn military budget is a waste. That social healthcare is inefficient and is throwing money down a bottomless pit, that foreign aid is unnecessary, that tax payer funded bailouts aren't essential and are a waste and so on...

 

The problem with that definition of "waste" is that ignores that every program that some people consider to be waste is a program that a large percentage of the voters want to preserve. Indeed many want to spend more on programs that others consider to be waste.

 

Weekend Edition September 21-23, 2012

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Not a Gaffe Machine
The Full Romney

by RALPH NADER
There was something missing from the release of a tape showing Mitt Romney pandering to fat cats in Boca Raton, Florida with these very inflammatory words: “There are 47 percent who are with him, (Obama) who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it. These are people who pay no income tax.” Romney said his job “is not to worry about those people.”
Hey, Mitt, why start with the 47 percent? Fully 100 percent of the nation’s 500 biggest corporations are dependent on various kinds of corporate welfare – subsidies, giveaways, bailouts, waivers, and other dazzling preferences – while many pay no tax at all on very substantial profits (see their familiar names – General Electric, Pepco, Verizon etc. – at http://www.ctj.org/pdf/notax2012.pdf).
Are the corporations that receive this corporate welfare going to vote for President Obama? (Mr. Romney has declared that corporations are people.) Of course they’re not. Nor are all of the 47 percent of people who are “dependent upon government.”
Mr. Romney doesn’t understand the double standard where government checks, whether already paid for or not, to people are called “entitlements” while far bigger checks to corporations are called “incentives.” Romney has lost control of his self-consciousness. Here is a man who talks about 47 percent of American households paying no income taxes (more on this later) while he has refused, unlike his father, to release back years of tax returns because they’ll show he has parked much of his wealth and income in foreign tax havens like the Bahamas precisely in order to avoid paying U.S. taxes.
Indeed, as tax expert and former New York Times Pulitzer prize-winner David Cay Johnston said on Democracy Now, Romney has maneuvered the tax laws so that his five sons will continue to receive millions of tax-free dollars from their parents’ enormous pot of wealth.
Why aren’t the big-time Democrats making much more of an issue of this “make or break” Romney campaign vulnerability? Maybe it is because, as author Kevin Phillips once said, “The Republicans go for the jugulars while the Democrats go for the capillaries.”
Now, either ignorance, callousness or both infected Mitt Romney’s pejorative characterizations of the “government dependent” 47 percent with victim mentalities who believe that they are entitled to the government providing them the necessities of life without paying income tax. Let’s see who these people are in these recessionary times. Unemployed Americans. Americans who are too poor to pay income taxes. Elderly Americans who live on their social security checks from money for which they spent their decades of working years paying. Americans using the “earned income tax credit,” so vigorously supported and extended by President Ronald Reagan. And disabled Americans who have no dollars for any income tax.
What do many of the 47 percent pay to the government? They pay payroll taxes for social security and Medicare, federal fees and state and local taxes on their property, and sales taxes.
The avarice of Romney and his buddies at the strip-mining, job-exporting, bankrupting private equity company called Bain Capital has no bounds. He thinks it’s perfectly fine for companies like Verizon, Boeing, Duke Energy, Navistar, Wells Fargo and Pepco to use all of our country’s government funded public infrastructures and services, and yet not only pay no income tax but actually rig the tax system so they can get billions back in “benefits” from the U.S. Treasury, as General Electric has done for years. At the same time, Romney never speaks out against 35,000 super-wealthy Americans who also do not pay any federal income tax. He rarely questions crony capitalism, wants to maintain an even bigger bloated military budget, and spearheads the many-sided supremacy of corporations over real people throughout our entire political economy. He is, essentially, a corporation running for president masquerading as an individual.
If the Democrats are anything but inept and defeatist, they will wrap Romney around Congressman Paul Ryan, his vice-presidential nominee, and recover the Congress in November. The Romney-Ryan campaign is now hanging by a few threads, unmasked even before those millions of American voters who dutifully vote for politicians who disrespect and betray their economic plight and political powerlessness once in office.
The so-called presidential debates are coming up (see opendebates.org). Let’s see if President Obama thinks it is fair play to recall Mr. Romney’s words and put his underlying real values on the table before tens of millions of viewers.
Romney’s excursus in Boca Raton was not a gaffe. It was the inner Romney, raised by good Romneys but braised by the fevered extremists in his party who have asserted that today Ronald Reagan himself would not receive their vote.
(Kudos to David Corn and Mother Jones magazine for bringing the Romney tape to the American people.)
Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate, lawyer and author of Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us! He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, published by AK Press. Hopeless is also available in a Kindle edition.

 

So, Romney (the so-called mystery man) has released his financials and has shown that he has paid more in taxes than he is legally required to do, by intentionally deducting less than his fair share for charitable contributions.

In fact he has proven that he has paid more than his fair share since 1990.

And this thread has dropped off the page.

Where are all the critics now?

And will the real mystery man, Barack Obama, reply in kind? NO.

And if he ever did reply in kind (just hypoethetically, because it will never happen), would the press bother to scrutinize it? NO.

Because Romney is not a man of mystery.
And Obama is a man of mystery.
And it does not matter.
Because the mainstream press has one job, and one job only:
To re-elect their paymaster, Barack Obama.
No matter what.

 

I can't understand why people don't like Gary Johnson. He sounds like a guy with common sense. In my country there are very few people that believe in freedom and liberty. Most people believe in entitlement and protection from the government, as a result we have a nanny state and a system that rewards people for being bums. But America is a freedom loving place, people are aware of what liberty means. Yes Johnson is a bit of a dweeb, but his political views are probably the most reasonable, fair, and sane out of everyone.

 

Romney remains a man of mystery because he has flipped his view on so many issues. No one is quite sure where he REALLY stands on the issues. This is a bigger concern than what his personal tax situation is. After all, if he were a tax evader, the IRS would have had him by now.