Why Romney might not "get it"

slurper_la

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Much has come to light over the past week about Willard's position on hard-working American families but none more telling than his belief that emergency room availability is a form of health care.

Willard grew up in a wealthy family, attended Ivy League schools and landed on his feet in a hedge-fund, financial services company where he made tens of millions of dollars. That's fine but its not the mark of a self-made man who built a business, pulling himself up by the bootstraps.

His 2011 tax returns have been released which show he earned $13,700,000.
He apparently donated $2.2M to charity and paid almost $2M in taxes.

First things first:
As a Mormon he is required, and we understand he is allegedly devout, to donate 10% to the LDS Church.
Assuming the best, $1,370,000 of his charity went to the church, leaving $830,000 to others. So 37% of his donations went to the church.

What's my issue with this? It's a blessing that we live in a country where we are free to choose where we want to donate our money. Be it a church, a cancer center, an AIDS clinic - no problem.

However, in my opinion, doing so limits the worth of the donations. The money is spread to various privately managed charity organizations which at times have profits, or operating expenses, sometimes including high salaries for executive directors, built into their budgets, diminishing the impact the money's donated can have on the needy. Furthermore, the fact that discretion, or discrimination, can and does occur is very troubling to me.

Now, as for Willard's "net" income:

Absent mathematical auditing, the numbers above suggest Willard would've been left with $9,500,000

Breaking that number down in the very simplest terms, Willard earned $26,000, per day, every day, without lifting a finger.

That's more than half the median salary of working Americans ($51,000) who work at least 40 hours per week for 50 weeks, just to survive.

In fact, Willard's DAILY income is equal to the ANNUAL income of almost 7 million American households. HOUSEHOLDS! http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/cpstables/032012/hhinc/hinc01_001.xls

I don't begrudge Willard his success or his wealth, outside of my concerns for everything he did to game the system, shutter manufacturing plants and outsource jobs overseas but I certainly do not think he could or would understand my circumstances nor care about where I am as a hard-working American
 

AtomicMouse1950

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"Waaaa, Romney made too much."

Nope... that wasn't the point. You get three more guesses, but the first two don't count. Care to guess again?



Much has come to light over the past week about Willard's position on hard-working American families but none more telling than his belief that emergency room availability is a form of health care.

Willard grew up in a wealthy family, attended Ivy League schools and landed on his feet in a hedge-fund, financial services company where he made tens of millions of dollars. That's fine but its not the mark of a self-made man who built a business, pulling himself up by the bootstraps.

His 2011 tax returns have been released which show he earned $13,700,000.
He apparently donated $2.2M to charity and paid almost $2M in taxes.

First things first:
As a Mormon he is required, and we understand he is allegedly devout, to donate 10% to the LDS Church.
Assuming the best, $1,370,000 of his charity went to the church, leaving $830,000 to others. So 37% of his donations went to the church.

What's my issue with this? It's a blessing that we live in a country where we are free to choose where we want to donate our money. Be it a church, a cancer center, an AIDS clinic - no problem.

However, in my opinion, doing so limits the worth of the donations. The money is spread to various privately managed charity organizations which at times have profits, or operating expenses, sometimes including high salaries for executive directors, built into their budgets, diminishing the impact the money's donated can have on the needy. Furthermore, the fact that discretion, or discrimination, can and does occur is very troubling to me.

Now, as for Willard's "net" income:

Absent mathematical auditing, the numbers above suggest Willard would've been left with $9,500,000

Breaking that number down in the very simplest terms, Willard earned $26,000, per day, every day, without lifting a finger.

That's more than half the median salary of working Americans ($51,000) who work at least 40 hours per week for 50 weeks, just to survive.

In fact, Willard's DAILY income is equal to the ANNUAL income of almost 7 million American households. HOUSEHOLDS! http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/cpstables/032012/hhinc/hinc01_001.xls

I don't begrudge Willard his success or his wealth, outside of my concerns for everything he did to game the system, shutter manufacturing plants and outsource jobs overseas but I certainly do not think he could or would understand my circumstances nor care about where I am as a hard-working American
 

dude_007

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Contrary to what is popular in right wing thought today, many liberal-minded Americans don't begrudge people who have a lot of money or make a lot of money. We are not trying to redistribute wealth. I hardly think making wealthy people pay more than they do now, because of Bush tax cuts and the tax loopholes made by big money in America, in order to help pay down the debt (which, by the way, is only of huge concern now because Obama is in office and is largely a manufactured "crisis" to win votes) is redistribution of wealth.

Get real. Total propaganda.

The problem is that neither Mr. Romney nor Mr. Ryan understand the concerns of average Americans, similar to the last Republican Administration. And look where that got us. The problem is Mitt Romney is so disingenuous, just listening and observing the man, you can tell he just doesn't give a shit about nor believe the lies that he now has to speak to keep the rouge conservatives from not voting, which is what they want to do, they just can't let Obama stay in, so they've changed voter laws and have Romney chirping out their rhetoric.
 

StormfrontFL

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Nope... that wasn't the point. You get three more guesses, but the first two don't count. Care to guess again?
What h0neymustard doesn't seem to understand is that Mitt has never had to go through what the average working man has. When he was in college and needed money he cashed in some stock. The average college student either borrowed from the parents, got a second job, or sold blood. The Republicans who are out of touch have been saying that the poor are poor because they are lazy which is patently false. I know a girl who graduated from college and is working 2 jobs and after she pays all her bills she has only $56 to carry her to her next paycheck. It's laughable for someone who either inherited their wealth to say that anyone who works 40+ hours a week is lazy. How many of them could do some of the jobs that pay so little and require much sweat?
 

balsary

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What h0neymustard doesn't seem to understand is that Mitt has never had to go through what the average working man has. When he was in college and needed money he cashed in some stock. The average college student either borrowed from the parents, got a second job, or sold blood. The Republicans who are out of touch have been saying that the poor are poor because they are lazy which is patently false. I know a girl who graduated from college and is working 2 jobs and after she pays all her bills she has only $56 to carry her to her next paycheck. It's laughable for someone who either inherited their wealth to say that anyone who works 40+ hours a week is lazy. How many of them could do some of the jobs that pay so little and require much sweat?

This girl that graduated from college, what was her degree in? Where does she live and what kind of car does she drive? What are the two jobs she holds? I ask because it's possible for someone making $100,000 a year to only have $50 to get them to their next paycheck. I know people that make more yet have less to spend.
 

StormfrontFL

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This girl that graduated from college, what was her degree in? Where does she live and what kind of car does she drive? What are the two jobs she holds? I ask because it's possible for someone making $100,000 a year to only have $50 to get them to their next paycheck. I know people that make more yet have less to spend.
She majored in environmental studies, lives in a 1 bedroom apartment in South Miami, and drives a 2008 Saturn. She works 40 hours a week as a retail associate and 16 hours working for Miami-Dade County Parks. She, like many others, has taken whatever jobs are available. Many people are working for lower wages than would normally be acceptable.
 

JTalbain

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"Waaaa, Romney made too much."
I think it's actually more akin to the point made with George H.W. Bush. He was all about his foreign policy, and people asked him about the economy, and weren't satisfied with the answers they got. So they started asking questions like "How much is a gallon of milk?" Bush probably hadn't had to go shopping for groceries in his adult life, so he didn't have a clue. The point was to show that Bush was out of touch; he had no clue how much things cost and how bad some people had it because his money insulated him from virtually every hardship.

Being rich doesn't make you necessarily out of touch. Many rich people, particulary the self-made entreprenurial sort, still know what it's like to roll pennies for gas money, or at least have the empathy to relate. However, Romney is showing a clear cognitive dissonance with the rest of America by making statements like his "emergency room" and "47%" comments. Equating emergency room care with good, available healthcare is ridiculous. The 47% comments had him labelling people on welfare programs, people who don't pay federal income taxes, and people too lazy to go get a job as all being the same group, which is downright insulting.

Being out of touch does matter. How can we expect a President to fix problems, if he can't even correctly identify what the problems are? How can we expect reasonable solutions if the rubric for what is reasonable is completely different in his worldview?
 

StormfrontFL

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I think it's actually more akin to the point made with George H.W. Bush. He was all about his foreign policy, and people asked him about the economy, and weren't satisfied with the answers they got. So they started asking questions like "How much is a gallon of milk?" Bush probably hadn't had to go shopping for groceries in his adult life, so he didn't have a clue. The point was to show that Bush was out of touch; he had no clue how much things cost and how bad some people had it because his money insulated him from virtually every hardship.

Being rich doesn't make you necessarily out of touch. Many rich people, particulary the self-made entreprenurial sort, still know what it's like to roll pennies for gas money, or at least have the empathy to relate. However, Romney is showing a clear cognitive dissonance with the rest of America by making statements like his "emergency room" and "47%" comments. Equating emergency room care with good, available healthcare is ridiculous. The 47% comments had him labelling people on welfare programs, people who don't pay federal income taxes, and people too lazy to go get a job as all being the same group, which is downright insulting.

Being out of touch does matter. How can we expect a President to fix problems, if he can't even correctly identify what the problems are? How can we expect reasonable solutions if the rubric for what is reasonable is completely different in his worldview?
Your highness, the people have no bread.

Well let them eat cake
 

balsary

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She majored in environmental studies, lives in a 1 bedroom apartment in South Miami, and drives a 2008 Saturn. She works 40 hours a week as a retail associate and 16 hours working for Miami-Dade County Parks. She, like many others, has taken whatever jobs are available. Many people are working for lower wages than would normally be acceptable.

I can't disagree with this. A big problem with employers, in my experience, is that they know there is an abundance of labor out there. They can afford to treat you like shit so they do.
 

redneckgymrat

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I'm going to go with you don't listen to the guy much then.

If I may?

Honey, you and I *hear* contempt and hatred when we listen to Obama blunder his way through one of his speeches, at least partly because of our distaste for almost everything the man stands for. In other words, our expectations color the way that we experience what some others incomprehensibly call an inspirational speech, or sometimes even "soaring rhetoric."

In much the same way, the abject hatred and contempt felt for Romney (and for many Republicans) by those on the left can affect the way they hear what our side says, and even the way we say it.

In this way, we can all listen to the same speech, and come away with wildly different impressions. I *believe* them when they say that they hear a man who is out of touch with the working man.
 

AtomicMouse1950

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No one hates Romney. :rolleyes: What people "don't like" about Romney and Ryan, is they're both out of touch with the electorate. But you live in that Fox News Thought Bubble, and there's no busting you out, to get the fresh air you so deserve.



If I may?

Honey, you and I *hear* contempt and hatred when we listen to Obama blunder his way through one of his speeches, at least partly because of our distaste for almost everything the man stands for. In other words, our expectations color the way that we experience what some others incomprehensibly call an inspirational speech, or sometimes even "soaring rhetoric."

In much the same way, the abject hatred and contempt felt for Romney (and for many Republicans) by those on the left can affect the way they hear what our side says, and even the way we say it.

In this way, we can all listen to the same speech, and come away with wildly different impressions. I *believe* them when they say that they hear a man who is out of touch with the working man.
 

StormfrontFL

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If I may?

Honey, you and I *hear* contempt and hatred when we listen to Obama blunder his way through one of his speeches, at least partly because of our distaste for almost everything the man stands for. In other words, our expectations color the way that we experience what some others incomprehensibly call an inspirational speech, or sometimes even "soaring rhetoric."

In much the same way, the abject hatred and contempt felt for Romney (and for many Republicans) by those on the left can affect the way they hear what our side says, and even the way we say it.

In this way, we can all listen to the same speech, and come away with wildly different impressions. I *believe* them when they say that they hear a man who is out of touch with the working man.
How many working class people consider eating tuna a struggle? How many brush off financial worries by tapping into their inheritance?

Mitt Romney and Ann: the students “struggling” so much that they had to sell stock.

She is almost as bad as a girl I went to high school with who cried to her classmates that her parents were so cruel because all she really wanted for her 16th birthday was a new red Corvette and instead they gave her a new red Mustang. She couldn't understand why her classmates didn't sympathize. Perhaps it was because our parents weren't loaded like hers.
 

FuzzyKen

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Right now with the labor market in many places being absolutely able to call the shots there are people being terminated under false pretense simply so that the employer can now hire another different single employee for less money, or worse, he can hire two employees for one single job, pay zero benefits calling them both "part time" and he wins three ways.

These are greed and abuses now commonplace. In fact, because of budget cutbacks and government reductions many claims regarding unpaid salaries and unpaid overtime or unpaid hours are going completely without even investigation. Federal labor law is taking quite a hit too, and it may take several years before some individuals are able to collect the money due them even when they are working.
 

redneckgymrat

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rainbowknight

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AutomicMouse is correct. The people I know do not care enough or know enough about him to hate him. Even before the 50K a plate fund raiser statements were put in the news, his speeches projected just what he stated.

One thing that I liked about Bush is that he was a "Decider." Even though he came down on the wrong side, he made a choice. Romney has been flopping for years. We need a leader who is going to make hard choices and stand behind them. So, I will wait and see who is on the ballot November 6th.
 

StormfrontFL

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How many "working class" have pawned tools or TV/gaming consoles, or even sold blood, as a way to raise money?

His story, of selling something as a way to raise quick cash, is analogous.

It all depends on how you look at it.
The difference is that he was not in danger of being broke. Having thousands of dollars as a cushion is different than only having a few items that may have some value at a pawn shop. Ann said that they didn't want to depend on their parents but they had the option of accepting help from very wealthy parents if it came down to it. Many parents with kids in college are already in debt just getting the kids into college.

It used to be said that Americans wanted to vote for a guy they could be comfortable having a beer with but Mitt doesn't even seem comfortable sharing a doughnut with the common man.