I am the 47% [View all]

[McCamy Taylor]

I am one of the 47%. I am definitely going to vote for Obama. So will my mother and her husband. My husband and my 21 year old son plan to vote for him as well. So will my sister and her adult daughter. That makes all of us part of the 47%. What do we have in common (besides a desire to see Obama serve a second term)? According to Mitt Romney, we are "dependent on government" and "believe that (we)are entitled to health care, to food, to housing".

Let’s analyze these claims one at a time, starting with health care. I have employer sponsored health care that covers me, my husband and my 21 year old college age son, so none of us gets healthcare from the “government”. Obamacare will allow my healthy son to stay on my insurance for five more years, but I am not sure that counts as being “dependent on government” for his health care. My mom’s husband is covered by his aerospace industry employer. My mother, a NASA retiree, is covered by NASA, Medicare and her husband’s insurance. That makes her super-insured. Is Romney trying to claim that her Medicare is a government handout? Does he think that federal agencies like NASA should not provide retirement insurance? My sister gets insurance for her and her two kids (one college aged) from her employer, a petrochemical refinery. She has a union and good benefits, but no one could call her insurance a government handout.

On to food. None of us gets food stamps. On the contrary, we donate to area food banks. None of our kids gets free school lunches. The only “free” food we get is that which we grow in our own gardens. Romney and Ryan may complain that the food my mother buy’s with her Social Security check is a government handout. But she is over 70 years old and worked her entire adult life paying into the Social Security system, so I tend to think of it as retirement income.

My home is paid for. My mother’s home is paid for. My sister is still paying a mortgage on her new home, but no one helps her make her payments.

I guess you could say that we are “dependent on government” since we use the roads and if we have a fire, we call the fire department and the public health department sprays for mosquitoes when West Nile is a problem and we rely on the FDA to make sure the food (which we buy with our own money) is safe to eat. But we aren’t getting any government services for “free”. All of us pay taxes. We pay income tax. We pay sales tax. We pay property tax. We pay fuel taxes and alcohol taxes. And when all the taxes are paid, we give to charity, too---

Come to think of it, we are not dependent upon the government. The government is dependent upon us. And we want to be sure that our tax dollars are spent wisely. We want to see our taxes spent on roads and disease prevention and good schools and clean air and water and national security and all the other things that government is supposed to provide. We absolutely do not want to see our tax dollars diverted into the accounts of people who are so rich they will never be able to spend all their money.

You know how I define the so called “47%”? We are the ones who want to have some control over how our country is run and our tax dollars are spent. We are the ones who think America is worth investing in. And Romney/Ryan despise us because we are too smart to buy their "trust us, we can pay for those tax cuts and still balance the budget" line.