WASHINGTON — Mitt Romney decided to fully join the battle on social programs, warning in an interview Tuesday with Fox News that the nation's spending was putting it "on a pathway that looks more European than American."
In standing by the substance, if not the tone, of his surreptitiously recorded remarks at a private fund-raiser in May and published on Monday, Mr. Romney waded into an ideological clash pitting two strands of conservative thinking against each other: the longstanding goal of reducing the tax burden on the poor with tax credits versus the growing anxiety that the nation's "takers" are now overtaking its "makers."
The statistic Mr. Romney referred to at the fund-raiser came from the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, which published an analysis showing that 46.4 percent of American households did not pay federal income tax in 2011. That statistic shocked many policy elites, small-government populists and members of Congress and has led to conservative hand-wringing.
The households in question consist primarily of the retired, the poor and low-income families with children, according to nonpartisan analysts. Moreover, they do pay taxes, if not income taxes: Just 8 percent of households do not pay payroll or federal income taxes, discounting the elderly.
Mr. Romney stood by his statement in an interview with Neil Cavuto of Fox News on Tuesday. "I think a society based upon a government-centered nation where government plays a larger and larger role, redistributes money, that's the wrong course for America," he said, adding that he hoped to improve the economy enough that people would be able to get well-paying jobs and rejoin the tax rolls.
Mr. Romney's thinking on the matter has been shaped in part by Arthur C. Brooks, the president of the conservative American Enterprise Institute. Mr. Brooks said that he had discussed his new book, "The Road to Freedom: How to Win the Fight for Free Enterprise," with Mr. Romney, who was particularly interested in whether redistribution would lead to a disengaged electorate — with the government paying for programs benefiting more people with dollars coming from fewer of them.
"It's not necessarily a good thing for the country that more people are pulling more benefits out of the system than they're paying in," Mr. Brooks said in an interview. "That's not a healthy thing for citizenship, and it's not good for these people themselves either, if they feel attenuated from their government."
The notion that too few Americans are paying income taxes has gained currency on the right in recent years. An influential 2002 Wall Street Journal editorial called the millions of American households that do not pay income tax "lucky duckies." Last year, Erick Erickson, the conservative firebrand, started a Web site called "We Are the 53 Percent," mocking the 99-percent theme of Occupy Wall Street and chiding Americans for failing to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.
But other Republicans have argued that the focus on the people who do not pay taxes is a mistake.
Reihan Salam, a conservative author, wrote on National Review Online on Tuesday that "the version of conservative tax policy I favor might actually further reduce the share of tax units that pay federal income taxes, yet it would strengthen the work ethic, increase labor force participation, and discourage the kind of dependency that concerns Mitt Romney."
For a long time, cutting taxes for the poor was a major emphasis of the Republican Party. One reason that many poor people no longer pay federal income taxes is that they qualify for credits such as the earned-income tax credit, which has its roots in conservative thinking and has long been supported by members of both parties as a way to help the poor without increasing welfare payments or raising the minimum wage. The credit was added to the tax code when Gerald Ford was president, and was expanded by Republicans and Democrats, including President Ronald Reagan, who called it "one of the best anti-poverty programs this country has ever seen" in 1986.
President George W. Bush, for his part, doubled the child tax credit, and his tax cuts erased the federal income tax liability for millions of households.
By NICOLA CLARK 19 Sep, 2012
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Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/19/us/politics/romneys-anxiety-over-takers-conflicts-with-longtime-gop-stand.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
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