How to profit from the 47%

Rather than using poor people the comic should have said aborted fetuses. That would far closer to how libs think.

Interesting to get an idea of how a right-wing nitwit sees the world - or rather sees a world that he has imagined with a little bit of help from the dafter aspects 0f Fox News...

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The left projects onto the right a desire to kill. The left actually does kill.

That's probably not the 47% that Romney was referring to.

When you consider that the life expectancy in the US is about 78 years, and the average person doesn't start earning a taxable income until they turn 18, and stops when they turn 65, 40% of that 47% are people who are going to pay taxes when they grow up or have paid taxes and are now retired.

Some 40% of the US population gets into tertiary education, which knocks another three years off their tax-paying period. which accounts for another 1.5% of the "dead-heads" and American mothers tend to stop work for a year or two while they have kids - say four years for the two kids per mother that would sustain the population, adding an other

That gets us up to 44%. There's a certain irreducible level of unemployment - even if everybody got a new job after losing their old one, it doesn't happen instantly.

So Romney was actually bitching about 2% of the population. 5% of the population needs psychiatric care at some point in their lives so he would have pretty much bitching about the human condition if he and his audience had had the wit to run the numbers.

Republicans are very selective about the numbers they pay attention to.

He was just being rational. He said that people who don't work are unlikely to vote for Republicans. You don't work, and you wouldn't vote Republican.

I voted for the British Labour Part all time I lived in the U.K., when I was in work, and being paid about twice the average UK industrial wage, so your logic doesn't actually work.

And Romney wasn't being all that rational. Of that 47% who don't have a taxable income, the under-18s - roughly 23% of the population - don't have a vote anyway. The over 65s do have a vote, and utilise it more enthusiastically than younger people

so he'd be better off thinking about issue that are important to them, like Medicare, no matter how distasteful they are to the lunatic fringe - aka core membership - of the Tea Party.

NEEP NEEP NEEP

Dang, you set off all the logical fallacy detectors, and I'm going to have to go around and reset them all.

Rubbish. If you had logical fallacy detectors that worked, you'd be deaf.

I think we ought to grind up rich people and eat them, then share their stuff.

Everyone who's worked twenty, thirty, or forty years of double-shifts to build up something for their families--to make jobs and employ people--every selfish person with that level of drive, ambition and self-sacrifice to the altar of productivity should be eliminated. It's for the common good.

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A modest proposal, but Jonathan Swift did it first, and trifle more deftly. You should also take a look at "The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters" by Daniel Defoe. That was at least subtle enough that quite a few of the people he was satirising took it seriously.

You really should have included some kind of vaguely plausible rationalisation.

Your slightly more subtle comic piece where you purported to argue that because the median income is declining under Obama, the economy isn't actually recovering had the right level of irrationality, but failed as satire because you didn't manage to make it clear that the average income was rising - because of the efforts of the Tea Party in Congress, who have contrived to ensure that all the economic growth has gone to the top 5% of the income distribution (it's probably actually been concentrated even closer the the high end of the distribution, but the top 5% does include them).

Satire has to include some hint that it is actually satirical - what you originally wrote was indistinguishable from naive Republican boosterism. "Median income" was the giveaway but that could easily have been an unconscious revelation.