The 47% from my point of view

From my point of view the 47% are made up of local, state, and federal government employees, welfare recipients,  and government appointees at all levels including all three branches of government.   The problem with the concept of the 47% is perception.

Let's take an example of a local city parks employee who makes $38,000/year.  The associated payroll costs are about 40%, so actual cost to the city is about $53,200/year not including the vehicle and government issued supplies.  This $53,200.00 is money paid into the city's coffers in the form of taxes.  It may have been received through grants from state or federal government, but it all comes back to taxes.  The employee returns about 17% to local, state, and federal taxes including income tax, fica, medicare taxes, etc. or about $9044.00.  Therefore the employee actually reduces tax income from governments by $44,156.00.

While I don't advocate reducing these employees, it is important to see that they don't "pay" taxes.  Instead they "receive" taxes.  It doesn't feel that way to the employee, but the reality is that they pay a negative tax as shown above.

The same scenario applies to any government employee, appointee, and welfare recipient.  Retirees are not the same because most of them paid into a phantom retirement program for years and years because the government told us it would pay for our retirement.  I saw a report last week that indicated that if a person who had worked 40 years had put the same amount of money into an investment account as was paid into Social Security either by the employee or by the employer, even if there was no interest earned on the account, average payout would be over $30,000/year at retirement.  And government could not have raided Social Security monies that were supposed to be in a secure account.  That being the case, we can safely call what the federal government has foisted on us fraud.  This is the ultimate ponzi scheme and we, the people, fell for it.

So those government employees who rely on government paychecks surely will vote for those who will guarantee their continued employment.   Surely I would.  It is just a matter of survival particularly if government is the only employer that will hire us.

However, there are some who can see this picture and will vote for the health of our nation instead of continued decay.