Cohn: Romney’s “47 Percent” Comments and the Social Contract

Jonathan Cohn at TNR is a valuable resource.  I really like what he had to say the other day about Mitt’s “47 percent” comments.  Here’s my favorite part (emphasis added):

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Are the people who benefit from [ “entitlement state” programs like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security ] today takers rather than makers? Hardly. Most of these people contributed what they could towards he cost of these programs, via payroll taxes, during their working years. If they don’t contribute now—and, remember, the majority of them still contribute something, since Medicare has both cost-sharing and premiums—it’s because they are no longer capable of doing so. …

The growth of these programs has placed significant new demands on the federal budget. That’s why there should be, and has been, a vibrant debate about how to make the programs sustainable…

But the fact that the entitlement state has grown shouldn’t, by itself, alarm us. It’s actually a sign of progress, because it’s a reminder that the government has stepped in to do what the market would not. We saw, in the years before Social Security, what the world looks like when seniors don’t have adequate pensions. And we saw, in the years before Medicare and Medicaid and (now) the Affordable Care Act, what the world looks like when people can’t afford to pay their medical bills. It was not pretty. But the price for addressing those failures was the creation of some massive government programs. They cost a lot of money, yes, but we all benefit from them at some point, as Schmitt noted in his essay: “Most of us, other than the permanently disabled, are givers and takers to government, because that’s what it is to be part of a community or a nation.”

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