Who are the 47%?

Mitt Romney was here in Los Angeles yesterday to address the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce.  The same day a video from a Romney fundraiser was released by the magazine Mother Jones.  Romney is attending a fundraiser where he states: "There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, 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. That that's an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what…These are people who pay no income tax."

""[M]y job is is not to worry about those people. I'll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives."

Juliet Lapidos from the New York Times defines the 47%.  Interesting.

Editor David Frum states "More than one-fifth of Romney's moocher 47% are elderly: people who pay no income taxes because their income takes the form of Social Security - many of those people are Republican voters (even if they don't understand "dependency" to apply to them)."

My favorite quote from the Frum article:
"So when a politician or a broadcaster talks about 47% in "dependency," the image that swims into many white voters' minds is not their mother in Florida, her Social Security untaxed, receiving Medicare benefits vastly greater than her lifetime tax contributions; it is not their uncle, laid off after 30 years and now too old to start over. No, the image that comes into mind is minorities on welfare."

David Brooks from the New York Times talks about Thurston Howell Romney.

In 2010 Howard Gleckman, Brookings Institute, addressed the 47% number in his blog About Those 47 Percent Who Pay “No Taxes

From the article "However, this class warfare-like rhetoric plays to a perception that the income tax is a chump tax: Only hard-working folks like us pay it. The welfare queens don’t. The super-rich don’t. It is a powerful emotional argument. It is also flat wrong.
So who are these folks who pay no federal income taxes? Mostly, they are people who don’t make very much money. Many are elderly: Think a widow living only on Social Security benefits. Others are parents earning less than $20,000. Only about 5 percent are non-elderly households making more than $20,000."