GOP’s hands dig deep in government’s pockets
Politics have always been dirty business, and this election has been no different. We have seen attacks from both sides that may have crossed a line, none more interesting than Mitt Romney’s stance on welfare. In his much maligned “47 percent” remarks, Romney essentially wrote off half of the country as degenerate freeloaders, victims dependent on government assistance. Though he admitted they were “not elegantly stated”, Romney never actually apologized for his comments and stands by his assertion that President Barack Obama has made the country reliant on government handouts. He also has continued to claim in ads that Obama has attempted to ease up work requirements on welfare, even though that claim has been thoroughly debunked. But as is the case with so many politicians, Romney’s rhetoric on the subject doesn’t really match up with his record.
One of the crowning achievements of Romney’s career was his involvement with the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. Romney has taken credit for turning the effort around and making it successful, just as he claims he can do with the U.S. economy if he is elected. But the facts show Romney had some help in doing that. Those Olympics would not have been possible without $1.5 billion in federal funds Romney himself had a hand in acquiring. At $625,000 per athlete competing in the games, that was more money than all of the previous Olympics held in the U.S. combined and adjusted for inflation. And this money did help Salt Lake City, but records also show some of that money ended up in the hands of resort owners and developers. For some reason I doubt that Romney would be willing to call those professionals and the people of Salt Lake City victims.
Interestingly enough, it gets even closer to home for Romney. A video has surfaced from 1962 of Romney’s mother discussing how his father George was on, in her words, “welfare relief” shortly after he emigrated here from Mexico. But Romney has claimed his father was an American success story, not someone without personal responsibility for his life.
Republicans have long vilified welfare, but they are inconsistent when they themselves benefit from it. The focus is always on the people who get fired from every job for being a bad employee but still get an unemployment check, or the mother who keeps having children just to get more food stamps. And while these people may exist, they are by no means typical welfare recipients. Typical recipients are people who work jobs that just don’t pay enough to make ends meet and elderly who have already spent years paying into the system. Romney can pretend that it is somehow more heinous when they take money from the government than when he does, but it simply isn’t true.