Can I call you Mitt? I think using country club nicknames gives us a sense that we are chummy and such, even though I would never, ever vote for you. My name is Snarkshelf, but you can call me Bunny, OK? I never went to boarding school or anything, but I am certain that if I had, that would be my boarding school nickname.
Anyway, I am writing to you because my father cannot. He's very busy not paying taxes. He's a resident of that crucial swing state, Ohio. Not that he would ever, ever vote for you, but I thought I would drop you a line on my monogrammed stationary, the one with the family crest, to tell you what I thought of the video of you speaking at the $50,000-a-plate dinner in Boca Raton.
I am EN-TITL-ED to think you are a douche.
I am pretty sure my father did not see the video that has been going around the Internet the last 24 hours. The one where you said that 47 percent of Americans - I think you called them "those people" - Good one! - don't pay taxes, and are eternal takers of handouts.
I especially liked the way you emphasized "ENTITLED" when you said they believe they are victims and that they are EN-TITL-ED to health care and food. Those bastards!
Anyway, dad lives in a nursing home, and while the TV is on a lot, it is often tuned to Lawrence Welk Show reruns, I Love Lucy and the Lifetime Channel. It's true - the women do outlive the men- and it shows in the octogenarians' viewing choices over there.
I am pretty sure a good number of the residents at the home are exactly the scourge to whom you are referring. They don't pay taxes (too poor!). And they have their grubby little hands - you know the ones that survived the Holocaust or spent 40 years working as a tailor or in an Ohio steel plant - on all those entitlement programs like Medicare and Medicad.
Actually, I am pretty sure most of them are like my dad. Good people who worked hard for years, decades, a lifetime. My dad was a salesman who was pretty successful and a pretty good taxpayer for a long time. At his earning peak, let's say 1980, he probably earned over $100,000, or about $279,000 in today's dollars. And paid lots of taxes.
We had a nice house in a nice suburb. For a time, we had a vacation house and also a motorhome. He paid for college for his two kids. He left every waitress from Toledo to Steubenville a 35-percent tip because he liked people who also worked hard.
Then, when he was 66, the company where he worked for 25 years was taken over, Bain Capital style. Mass layoffs ensued and the manufacturing part was shipped overseas - stop me if you have heard this one before. But the CEO landed in Darien with a golden parachute, thank goodness. Perhaps he was at your fancy dinner in Boca?
My dad made it work with some retired guy jobs for about six more years. Then he had a stroke. Then he had another one. After a slow downward slide into dementia, he ended up at the nursing home a few years after that. That was over four years ago.
Have I mentioned the rack rate over there is about $10,000 a month?
Now, I know you said people should borrow the cost of college from their parents. Next you will probably tell me that we should take care of seniors right up until the end, whenever that may be, right there in our living rooms. Both are easier said than done.
We're talking a profound level of disability here. As in depending (EN-TITL-ED?) on others for every basic need. Ever try and lift a 170-pound man into the shower, Mitt? Didn't think so. You know who does that for the good people at the home? A staff of workers who probably make $12 an hour.
Some of these (mostly) ladies take two buses in the snow to get out of inner-city Cleveland to the Eastern suburbs to change adult diapers and spoon mushed up foods into the mouths of the residents. Indeed, I am sure a few of them still don't pay taxes because their income is not high enough. That doesn't seem like they are victims to me. Seems like they are doing the best they can in a crappy Rust Belt economy with limited education and more mouths to feed at home.
As for my dad, even if he planned perfectly and saved and saved and saved, he likely would be exactly in the same spot. It's been over four years at the home now. That's $120,000 a year times 4. Which equals almost half a million dollars.
The nest egg would have been well cracked long ago. Thank God for Medicaid, one of those nasty EN-TITL-Ement programs.
You may call it entitlement. You may call all of us, as you did in Boca, "those people who believe government has a responsibility to care for them" or someone you can never convince "to take personal responsibility and care for their lives."
Except we did. And we do.
But life happens. So I call you "completely out of touch with obstacles that face most Americans" whether it is for a generation or for a rough retirement.
Hopefully, on Nov. 6 I will also call you a loser.
See you at the regatta,
Snarkshelf
