Setting aside that he’s putting seniors, veterans, the disabled, students and people who hold two jobs and pay payroll taxes in with these “people who believe they are victims,” no one actively wants their children to be on welfare, or desires to be dependent on the government. 92% of Americans say that hard work is the key to success, according to a Pew Research Survey. cite. Indeed, a recent Times study showed that the majority of government assistance was actually going to middle class people (mostly, as it happens, in Republican states) who grow increasingly more and more resentful of the government the more they have to take.

By cherry-picking the Income Tax specifically, Romney gets to include the 28% of households that pay payroll taxes, but don’t make enough money to pay income tax (i.e., the working poor). Of the 18% who pay no Federal taxes, more than half are elderly.

So, your “large group” of moochers must be somewhere in that remaining 8%. That is, some of them there, and some in your own head.

Deriding half the country as unwilling to take “personal responsibility” because they believe they are entitled to the same basic government functions as the whole developed world is stupid enough. But those aren’t even the same Americans who depend most on those functions, who include great numbers who always vote Republican.

So it’s just more nonsense and mischaracterizing his opponents, not speaking truth at all. How anyone can stand up for it is beyond me.

And I mean the president starts off with 48, 49, 4— he starts off with a huge number. These are people who pay no income tax. Forty-seven percent of Americans pay no income tax. So our message of low taxes doesn’t connect. So he’ll be out there talking about tax cuts for the rich.

I mean, that’s what they sell ever four years. And so my job is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives. What I have to do is to convince the five to ten percent in the center that are independents, that are thoughtful, that look at voting one way or the other depending upon in some cases emotion, whether they like the guy or not.”

Any differnet than this: “You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. 

And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

Basically the first guy said “There’s this large group of people who are dependent on government, and won’t be weened off of it,” and the second guy said “There’s this large group of people who don’t trust the government to save them, and instead cling to religion and/or guns.”

They’re both CORRECT!  

They both are going after the people in the middle, and that’s what’s going to decide things this election.  

This turned out to be an unwise move after the video showed him saying “these filthy serfs are dragging us all down, endangering our millions and millions of dollars.”  and “These low-lifes will never get off the government tit until they are forced to face with dignity the decision between being hungry on the streets or getting a really shitty job, where they can at least eat OR pay rent.”