Romney comments- 47% freeloaders?

The statement that --"Clearly you don't have a clue about the tax structure" is self evidently worthless.

The problem with Mitt Romney’s comments about the 47 percent of Americans who don’t pay taxes isn’t just that they are highly misleading and damaging politically. They also severely misstate and undermine conservative principles at a time when many Americans desperately want an alternative to Obamaism.

Conservatism at its heart believes in the individual. We believe that every person has the capacity to devise a life of her or his own choosing, and that untoward government activity both channels and throttles a person’s ability to flourish. That is true whether someone is rich, poor or average; whether a person wants to climb the highest mountains or dwell in the deepest valleys.

When I came of political age in the late 1970s, conservatism was led by two giants, Ronald Reagan and Jack Kemp. Each came from humble backgrounds; each had known real adversity and expressed genuine empathy for the common man. Both had created uncommon lives for themselves. But neither thought that the people from the neighborhoods they left were anything but decent and honorable Americans, no matter how much they paid in taxes.

In their hands, conservatism ceased to be a theoretical oddity or academic exercise. It became the vital life force of American politics, the prism through which Americans could see their futures happily unfolding.

Central to this achievement was an obvious respect for the innate dignity of the average American. Kemp’s manifest passion for improving the lot of the poor endeared him to many who disagreed with his prescriptions. Reagan’s regard was less impassioned in his manner but just as profound.

And in Reagan’s view, ordinary people were capable of greatness. There was Lenny Skutnik, who plunged from obscurity into the icy waters of the Potomac to save passengers from a downed flight. There were ordinary GI Joes whose courage on the beaches of Normandy (or, today, in the valleys of Afghanistan) protect civilization.

It wasn’t so long ago that mainstream conservatism represented these values. We indexed income brackets and personal exemptions to inflation in the early 1980s to protect middle- and low-income families. Conservatives created the child tax credit in 1997 and expanded it in 2001 to reduce the tax burden for parents. In the past decade, we championed a flat tax that contained a generous exemption for a family of four, precisely so those least able to pay would not be forced to.

I believe the mainstream conservative still believes in these things. But when Romney divides the world into makers and takers and presumes that our ability to pay federal income tax is a measure of which group we belong to, he sends a different message. He implicitly tells average Americans that their quiet work doesn’t “make” America unless they are entrepreneurs who make enough money. Worse, he tells them that their lives aren’t even dignified, that they are “takers” who are unable to exercise personal responsibility over their lives.

Even Critics of Safety Net Increasingly Depend on It

LINDSTROM, Minn. — Ki Gulbranson owns a logo apparel shop, deals in jewelry on the side and referees youth soccer games. He makes about $39,000 a year and wants you to know that he does not need any help from the federal government.

He says that too many Americans lean on taxpayers rather than living within their means. He supports politicians who promise to cut government spending. In 2010, he printed T-shirts for the Tea Party campaign of a neighbor, Chip Cravaack, who ousted this region’s long-serving Democratic congressman.

Yet this year, as in each of the past three years, Mr. Gulbranson, 57, is counting on a payment of several thousand dollars from the federal government, a subsidy for working families called the earned-income tax credit. He has signed up his three school-age children to eat free breakfast and lunch at federal expense. And Medicare paid for his mother, 88, to have hip surgery twice.

There is little poverty here in Chisago County, northeast of Minneapolis, where cheap housing for commuters is gradually replacing farmland. But Mr. Gulbranson and many other residents who describe themselves as self-sufficient members of the American middle class and as opponents of government largess are drawing more deeply on that government with each passing year.

List the tax points from digging the iron ore to the engine in the boat .

Their vices are probably more favorable to the prosperity of the State than those if the indigent, and partake less of moral depravity.

most objective observers?