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Why people who are now unemployed and on the dole may still rationally vote Romney (despite him saying that they won’t)

Much is being made of Mitt Romney’s leaked comments to the effect that 47 per cent of America will never vote for him, because this 47 per cent depend on government hand-outs and he, Romney, has said he will cut these hand-outs.

Judging by what happened in Britain in the Thatcher years, Romney is (assuming I have it right what he said) wrong, about none of these people voting for him I mean. Here in Britain then, as in the USA now, unemployment was unprecedentedly high, and many assumed that nobody unemployed and drawing the dole would ever vote Thatcher. Yet quite a few such people did, and not just once either. They did it again and again.

Anti-Thatcherites said that this was false consciousness. These poor deluded, put-upon Conservative voters simply did not understand their own interests.

But what if such down-on-their-luck Conservative voters actually wanted jobs, even though they did not now have them? Many definitely did. What if they depended on government hand-outs, but hated this and longed for this demeaning arrangement to end? And what if, rather than blaming Thatcher for them having lost their old jobs, or even if they did blame Thatcher for them having lost their old jobs, they instead focussed on the future and regarded Thatcher as a better bet than the Labour alternative for them to get new and different jobs?

Even if all that any voter ever cares about is his or her own economic interests, and damn the country, for an unemployed person in the 1980s in Britain to vote Thatcher was at least a reasonable thing to do. It was not a self-evident case of someone not knowing what was best for them. Voting for the likes of Michael Foot or Neil Kinnock (Britain’s Obamas of those times, neither of whom ever made it to Prime Minister, thank God) might merely have made unemployment even worse, and jobs even harder to come by.

My point is not that such disagreement with the more usual opinion (if you’re unemployed vote left wing) of those times was definitely correct. I merely argue that such disagreement was a reasonable judgement to make, given that it was indeed a judgement call.

The same will apply to many Americans who depend on government hand-outs now, who will likewise vote for Romney rather than Obama, because they reckon Romney is more likely to get them back on their economic feet than Obama, and because back on their economic feet is where they really, really want to be.

And this will remain true, even though Romney has just (or so I have been reading) insulted these people by accusing them of being incapable of rational thought of the sort that I have just described, and of being incapable of voting other than for Obama, like so many sheep. At least Romney is showing hatred of the arrangements that they also hate, and which Obama might well make worse, and showing determination to change those arrangements. That might count for far more, in the eyes of an unemployed person who badly wants not to be unemployed, than those insults. So, he thinks I’m a sheep. So what? I know I’m not.

Thatcher herself never made the mistake of accusing unemployed Brits of being incapable of discerning what a brilliant Prime Minister she was, for them as for all others. From where she stood, only Labour voters were in the grip of false consciousness.

How many unemployed people will vote Romney? Rather more if Romney gives them further reason to vote for him, by saying something like: if you hate being dependent on the government, vote for me, and you’ve got a better chance of getting back into paid work than if you vote for the other fellow. Until now, I have only mentioned in passing the assumption that unemployed people are entirely lacking in public spirit, and incapable of voting for what they consider to be the best interests of their country as a whole, and deciding that the best interests of their country say: vote Romney rather than Obama.

One has only to state this assumption to realise that while it may describe some unemployed people (just as it describes lots of very busy and well paid people) it emphatically does not describe all of them.

Given how very, very little difference one person’s individual vote makes to the result of an election, there is nothing irrational about casting one’s vote in a public spirited way, rather than selfishly. Either way, it will make very little difference. Why not do what’s (very slightly) better for your country?

You are especially likely to vote public-spiritedly if, despite thinking hard about it, you simply cannot tell which candidate would be the one for you to vote for if you were voting entirely selfishly.

In a crisis, knowing how your own selfish interests are best served is probably harder.

And you might also vote more public-spiritedly in a crisis, because you may figure that during a crisis, you depend, more than usual, on good or at least less bad national decisions being made, for everyone, you most definitely included.

If lots of unemployed people reckon that the USA is indeed now facing a crisis – and if you have recently become unemployed, that would make a lot of sense – that might be one more reason why unemployed people might want to vote Romney. You might judge that however much Obama might want to go on paying you a pension out of the public purse in exchange for nothing, and however much he says he will go on doing this, crisis is in fact about to explode, and Obama will not in fact be able to keep such a promise. The crisis will then at least severely reduce your government income, and make it even harder to earn any other income by your own efforts.

You might well judge that voting Romney is more likely to keep you getting your government handouts, because a Romney government is less likely to collapse completely than an Obama government.

And what if you are unemployed, but not recently unemployed? What if you are long-term unemployed, and in the current state of things, unemployable? You still might want to have a job, some time before you die, so that people stop sneering at you, and so you can have a bit more money when you are old and when the world has gone even closer to hell than it is now. If you think like that, then you will really want the overall economic picture to brighten. And you too might judge that voting Romney is a less unlikely way to get that than voting Obama. Sort of like buying a lottery ticket. (Which is another thing that better off people often criticise poor people for doing, but which poor people nevertheless do in large numbers.)

Again, I’m not saying that you must, in sheer logic, vote Romney for all of the above such reasons, if you are one of those people Romney has just said will never vote for Romney. I merely say that it would be reasonable to vote Romney for such reasons as I have sketched out.

So, in sum, expect quite a few surprising people to vote Romney in this election, and this despite what the man himself has apparently been saying. Will these surprising people vote Romney in sufficient numbers to make much difference? Maybe not, but don’t assume so. It will be interesting afterwards to see the various calculations that people do, if they do any, to answer such questions.

I’ve just discovered, having already written most of the above, that if you scroll down here, at Instapundit, you’ll see that I am not the only one saying this stuff. To quote one of Instapundit’s incoming emails, from Tom Gunn:

I think this secret Romney tape is not going to do what the progressives expect it to do. 47% of the population on the dole, of that 47%, 23 million are not paying taxes BECAUSE they don’t have a job and would do near anything to be able to pay taxes because that would mean they have a JOB with income!

My extra contribution to what Instapundit has is the stuff at the top of this posting. Not only will a lot of the unemployed vote Romney. A lot of the unemployed did vote Thatcher.

That could have been it really.

I am aware that this is probably not one of my most well-thought-through postings. My excuse is that I am struggling to state quite complicated ideas, and probably also too many ideas, on account of them seeming to me to be closely related to one another. I started off only writing about the selfish interests of an unemployed person, but then tangented off towards public-spiritedness, and then onto to perceived crisis and how that might affect voting decisions by unemployed people. But what has been written has been written, and now that it has been written, it might as well get posted. Maybe commenters will be able to clean it up a bit, perhaps by saying everything I have said, better, and with fewer words.

21 comments to Why people who are now unemployed and on the dole may still rationally vote Romney (despite him saying that they won’t)

  • Lee Moore

    Is it as complicated as all that ?

    1. people can vote in what they perceive to be the interests of their country / community / whatever, even if they think it’s against their personal interests, and
    2. people currently dependent on the state may perceive that it is not in their interests to remain in that position (whether because they could do better with a good job in a thriving private sector, or because a la Greece, eventually the welfare state will run out of other people’s money)

    Romney’s point is exaggerated. There are lots of people dependent on the state who do not trouble themselves overmuch with No.1, and who perceive, in many cases correctly, that they could not realistically do any better than they do as a ward of the state. Aside from welfare mums, the disabled and so on, this will include lots of state employees – of the type that the private sector would employ, if at all, only in much less prestigious positions. But these people do not amount to 47% of the US voting public.

  • Schrodinger's Dog

    Unemployed and voting for Margaret Thatcher? Yes, that was me in 1983.

    And I never regretted it. In the later 80s I did well, as did a lot of other people, in no small part due to the policies pursued by the Thatcher government.

  • the other rob

    An excellent, if wide ranging, analysis Brian.

    While I think that your analysis of the “47%” is spot on, I’d like to tease out a point that you addressed only tangentially: Romney is no Thatcher – in truth, he’s far from it.

    It made sense for the unemployed back then to vote Thatcher because she offered an alternative to the headlong rush to destruction. Sadly, Romney may be correct – what sense would it make for today’s unemployed to vote for a marginally slower slide into the abyss?

  • Michael Foot would have been an interesting Prime Minister at the very least, committed as he was to taking the UK out of the EEC.

  • Paul Marks

    Yes some non Federal income taxpayers and even government dependents (NOT the same thing) may vote for Governor Romney – out of hope that he will be better (or less bad) for the country, specficially for jobs.

    There is a more recent example than Mrs Thatcher.

    Harris in Ontario – he really did cut government spending (which Mrs Thatcher did not do), but some government employees and welfare dependents voted for him.

    Because they understood (at a gut level) that (whatever the education system and mainstream media said) the real alternative was bankruptcy and breakdown.

    The real figure pf importance is not the 47% of Americans who do not pay Federal income tax – it is the 39% of Americans who say (in the polls at least) that government does not do enough.

    Think about that – they think that Comrade Barack does not give them enough free stuff, they want MORE, both for themselves and for others.

    These 39% are hard core Social Justice types (vermin) – it is pointless to try and convince them.

    However, (in the same polls) 54% of Americans say that government does too much.

    If Romney can reach that 54% – then he can win.

    But to do so Romney has to overcome two things.

    The vast education sysem and mainstream media (including entertainment media) disinformatiom and smear campaign against him (and against all Repiublicans).

    And, perhaps just as important, the legitimate doubts that free market supporting people have about it.

    Actually the recent attacks on Romney over the “47%” comments actually HELP him with free market supporting people.

    And he needs them to turn out and vote for him.

    This election will not be won or lost on convincing people – the battle lines between those who think government does too much and those who think it does too little are already drawn.

    The 54% and the 39% have nothing to say to each other (and the few percent who are in neither camp are not really open to argument either – they are the people who do not understand the question, and do not understand much about anything else either).

    The election will be won or lost on TURNOUT.

  • Alisa

    The main obstacle Romney has to overcome on order to win is himself.

    Other than that, I completely agree with Paul’s analysis.

  • J.M. Heinrichs

    There is already a clip in circulation where Mr Romney tells a questioner that if he/she wants more free stuff, “… then vote for the other guy.”

    Cheers

  • Alisa

    He should be doing much more of that – in fact, that should be one of his main selling points. Whether he really means that or not is another question, of course.

  • Andrew

    Something else interesting about the American public (and thus electorate) is that approximately half of the population pays no Federal Income Tax at all.

    This has always seemed to me to be anti-democratic, in the sense that clearly, a large part of the electorate has an incentive to vote against meaningful tax reform, debt reduction etc.

    It’s similar to the handouts thing of course but another element skewing the electorate towards big government, high taxes (on others) and increasing debt.

    My take on the US is there is a lot more welfare dependency then there was in UK during the Thatcher era, and the recipients are far more ‘comfortable’ with it too.

  • RRS

    Over at Econlog (Liberty Fund site) there have been discussions (and a book) about the fact that voters do not always (perhaps not generally) vote in what is perceived as their “self” interest.

    As for what Andrew cites, more telling is the data from the CBO published reports which show that over 60 % of the public get (by transfers) more than they put into the economy. I will try to post the cited facts separately.

    Much of that occurs without the receipients seeking the distributions or benefits, which are politically structured.

  • RRS

    This from Greg Mankiw’s Blog (14/07/2012) which can still be accessed:

    “Because transfer payments are, in effect, the opposite of taxes, it makes sense to look not just at taxes paid, but at taxes paid minus transfers received. For 2009, the most recent year available, here are taxes less transfers as a percentage of market income (income that households earned from their work and savings):

    Bottom quintile: -301 percent
    Second quintile: -42 percent
    Middle quintile: -5 percent
    Fourth quintile: 10 percent
    Highest quintile: 22 percent

    Top one percent: 28 percent

    The negative 301 percent means that a typical family in the bottom quintile receives about $3 in transfer payments for every dollar earned.

    The most surprising fact to me was that the effective tax rate is negative for the middle quintile. According to the CBO data, this number was +14 percent in 1979 (when the data begin) and remained positive through 2007. It was negative 0.5 percent in 2008, and negative 5 percent in 2009. That is, the middle class, having long been a net contributor to the funding of government, is now a net recipient of government largess.”

    That entire CBO report is online, and I have read and analyzed the spread sheet of Table 7. I don’t know the comparable stats for U K, but I would guess the trends are abit more extreme. That Table shows some decisive trends beginning 2004.

    Paul Ryan states that the results now indicate 70% are in the net recipient category.

    But, that does not mean they intend to be, or want to be.

  • PersonFromPorlock

    Keep in mind that Romney was digging for funds; of course he was going to emphasize the odds against him, to motivate the givers. He may very well have understood that many of the 47% are not committed Obama voters, but found it useful to ignore the fact in order not to queer his sales pitch.

  • Dave in St. Louis

    I’m on SSDI and I’m voting for Romney if it is close in my state or Johnson if it is not. But my primary objective is to get rid of the incumbent. I used to be able to buy a few nice but not necessary items – but no more with the price of food (which happened before the drought hit). the value of my dollar has gone into the toilet from QE and here we are doing another round. If Obama stays, I fear I’ll go under despite him possibly being better in terms of aiding me directly.

  • RRS

    That book to read is:

    The Myth of The rational Voter by

    Bryan Caplan

  • Snorri Godhi

    Romney cannot possibly believe himself that 47% figure, because no one can possibly hope to win an election when 47% of the vote is already lost.

    For one thing, some people who pay in taxes more than they get in benefits, might still think it is in their interest to expand the scope of the State. For instance, crony capitalists, or government employees.
    For another thing, some people vote for more welfare to satisfy their moral vanity.

    In addition there is the issue of turnout within that 47%: Romney should try to convince them that there is nothing to worry about and they might as well stay home.

  • Laird

    One can be in the 0% income tax bracket but not be a welfare sponge. All it requires is enough deductions to reduce one’s taxable income near or below the tax threshold, and/or the utilization of some of the available tax credits (earned income, child care, etc.) to eliminate any remaining tax due. I’ve been in that position myself a couple of times in the last few years: the economy is so ugly, and business was so bad, that my gross income shrank such that I owed no taxes. I wasn’t on welfare or food stamps, though; I mostly lived off savings.

    Also, keep in mind that the 47% “untaxed” figure represents only federal income taxes. Even people who pay no income taxes can pay large amounts in Social Security / self-employment taxes, not to mention all the federal excise taxes and other fees to which we’re subject. And someone on Social Security who earns more than a fairly minimal amount can be hit with a penalty equal to 50% of the SS benefits (if that isn’t a “tax” I don’t know what is!). So even for people in the 0% income tax bracket it can be quite rational to vote for Anybody But Obama, if they feel that someone else will (a) get the economy back on track (and so augment their income in the long run), (b) cut back on government and so reduce all those other fees, and/or (c) rationalize the regulatory scheme. And that doesn’t even include those who would like to see a more rational foreign policy, better cabinet and judicial appointments, the replacement of Ben Bernanke at the expiration of his term in January, etc. So there are lots of reasons for someone in the 0% income tax bracket to vote for Romney (or, in my case, Gary Johnson).

  • Pat

    There are non-economic reasons for voting as well.
    Some may perhaps feel that Mr. Obama has increased America’s standing in the world, others may think he has reduced it.
    Some resent being told what to do even if it is for their own good, others like to have a nanny.
    There are many issues and few if any are simple.
    Even on this issue, it seems that the majority of those in receipt of benefits did not apply for them and are probably unaware that they receive them- these people will likely see themselves as part of the 53%.

  • RRS

    Well Pat,

    There is also the question of what is designated “receipt of a benefits.”

    In one set I just saw, the residential mortgage deduction
    was included.

    Now, a provision in tax law that permits one to retain more of one’s own money – to be subjected to less tax – is not a benefit.

    Exemption from taxation is not a benefit; and a huge swath of Americans are so exempt. But they are not getting benefits un til they get a positive transfer to them of something that they did not produce by their own efforts.

  • Lee Moore

    Weeeell, up to a point Lord RRS. I take your point that there’s an important difference between getting something, and having less confiscated. But…..

    1. in the first place, we all get some benefits from the state in the form of armies and police and courts and roads etc. Sure we can debate how much that is all worth, and whether some of it would be better left to the market, and so on. But we all get something from the state. So if we pay zero tax, we’re getting those benefits for nothing. So tax refunds / credits of more than our “fair share of tax” to pay for the benefits we get still leave us as beneficiaries. Of course for practical purposes, most Samizdata readers would have paid their “fair share” of tax for necessary government services out of council tax and VAT, before having to start on income tax, but that’s a detail.

    2. If everybody has to pay $15,000 of tax, except registered members of the Labour Party, who get a credit of $7,000, then Labour members still have to pay $8,000 of tax. Nevertheless their $7,000 credit gives them a leg up as compared with everybody else. There’s still a sense in which favourable treatment is a benefit.

    3. Mortgage interest relief, however, is a doubtful candidate for the title of “favourable treatment.” It’s favourable compared with the treatment of other kinds of interest expense. But it’s not favourable compared with other ways of financing your house purchase, like just buying it outright. Buying your house outright is tax neutral – there’s no interest to deduct or to tax. Buying your house on a tax deductible mortgage is tax neutral, by a different route, the interest is both deductible and taxable. The fact that it’s taxable means the lender charges more than he would if the interest was not taxable. You pay more gross interest as a result. But your tax relief returns you back to square one again. So whether it counts as favourable treatment depends a bit on how you look at it. And from some angles it’s not favourable at all, it just tax neutrality.

  • RRS

    @ Lee

    Tax preferences, and other “privileges” do not involve the necessary transfer of something not produced by the recipient.

    There are many ways in which we all “benefit” from the organization, conditions and operations of our social order (that do not stem from our proportionate contribution to it) but do not result from transfers to us.

    Yes, there are other transfers to us (usually politically structured) such as the payments of costs for the education of our children that exceed our contrbution toward those costs. Many, if not most, of those are not “sought” by the recipients, but they continue to have broad social and political impacts.

  • RRS

    Brian M.

    In your heading of this original post, I note something surprising from a teacher (and reader):

    (despite him saying . . .)

    I am aware that is now MSM-speech; but doesn’t the use of a gerund apply?