CNN host Fareed Zakaria asked former President Bill Clinton last week about Republican Mitt Romney’s comment about 47 percent of the American people paying no income taxes. The interview aired yesterday. Link to video here.
Transcript:
The 47%, those that are adults, they do pay taxes. They pay Social Security taxes; they pay Medicare taxes; they pay state and local taxes. I saw a graph just today, which said that basically if you break us down into quintiles, 20%, 20%, 20% and then you break the top 20% down into 10, 5, 4, 1, we actually wind up paying pretty much the proportion to the amount of income that that group takes out of America every year. So I think that’s overstated. We should always be trying to promote empowerment over dependency. But the American people can easily be misled, it may be too strong a word, confused now because whenever you have a recession this deep, spending goes up on things like unemployment and food stamps and Medicaid for health care and revenues drop because people aren’t making as much money. But a lot of those people who don’t pay ordinary income tax would love to be back paying ordinary income tax, they’d love to…
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