Mitt’s right: Handouts do win votes!

Boston Herald ^ | September 19, 2012 | Howie Carr

Mitt Romney’s only mistake was lumping together all of the 47 percent who don’t pay income taxes.
A lot of them are elderly, and many of them are voting for Mitt. And there are some people who work, but just don’t make a lot of money, or who would be working if they weren’t legitimately disabled.
But the indisputable fact is, a huge percentage of Obama’s voters are basically wards of the state. There are millions of them, and they have no intention of voting for anyone who might want them to ever go out and work for a living — “no matter what.”

As Romney said in Boca Raton last May: “I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”

He’s right. Remember the women in Detroit who were lining up for “Obama bucks” right after the inauguration in 2009. A radio reporter asked them where they thought the money was coming from, and one of them guessed it was from Obama’s “stash. I don’t know. But he givin’ it to us. We love him!”
Who do you suppose those women will be voting for Nov. 6?
Undoubtedly the same candidate as the woman in Orlando who was videotaped at a 2008 rally for Democrats saying that once Obama got in, “I won’t have to worry about putting gas in my car, I won’t have to worry about paying my mortgage.”
This is nothing new. There’s a classic book that’s taught, or used to be taught, in college political science classes. “Democracy in America” — it was written more than 150 years ago by a Frenchman, Alexis de Tocqueville. He had the same take as Mitt on what has become the American welfare state:
“A democracy ... can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy.”
Can someone say QE3, the Fed’s third round of so-called quantitative easing?
Anyone who doesn’t think the welfare-industrial complex is trying to increase dependency isn’t paying attention. Last weekend in Arlington, someone handed me a letter from the superintendent of a school system north of Boston that’s trying to get more kids onto the town’s free lunch program.
“In an effort to increase participation in the program,” the superintendent wrote in boldface, “any family that completes a free/reduced lunch application by September 21, 2012, will be entered into a drawing on Monday, October 5 for a chance to win one of two iPads.”
Get on welfare, get a free iPad. It may not be PC to say it, but Mitt Romney is on to something here.