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By the time the first debate concludes, the "47% video" is not going to hurt Romney and this video will have no significant effect on the election results. There are two main reasons why the video will not hurt Romney: 1) the vast majority of seniors who were going to support Romney or leaning towards Romney before this video are people who paid a lot of income taxes during their working lives and thus they will consider themselves in the group that pays federal income taxes and not in the group of Americans that doesn't pay income taxes. Even if they are not paying income taxes right now in retirement they are still going to think of themselves as part of the income taxpaying group. 2) Given that a big part of the 47% who pay no income taxes are middle class people, this video undermines Obama's claim that the middle class is being overtaxed to pay for "tax cuts for the rich". So in publicizing this sneaky video, Zero's campaign is taking a big risk of conflicting messaging that cancels out one of Obama's main campaign themes.

Romney needs to speak out and advertise and make clear that this was a video of a quick answer to a question at a fundraiser in which he did not want to bore his audience with a lot of numbers and statistics. These were also off-the-cuff statements that were not fully researched in advanced and thus were never intended to be shown on television. This video only ended up on TV because of Zero's sleazy dishonest campaign tactics. But now that Zero has put this subject on TV, Mitt Romney needs to respond with a complete and fully researched answer in which he says that the group of Americans that have fallen into dependency on government does not include seniors, students, or disabled people. He needs to state that very specifically and clearly and get that message out to the American people through PAC advertising and campaign advertising. He should also say in general terms what his plans are to help move people out of government dependency into permanent jobs and self-reliance.

One more sub-group for Romney to add into the group that has not fallen into government dependency is people who are unemployed since 2009 because of the Great Recession. The group that Romney says have fallen into government dependency should only include the long-term unemployed and underemployed people, who need to get to work on training and educating themselves to do jobs that pay enough to support a solid middle-class lifestyle.

The main cause of poverty is lack of valuable job skills, knowledge, and education. Here in 2012, the main cause of poverty is not racial discrimination. Loss of manufacturing jobs to automation everywhere throughout the world is a minor cause of poverty, but the primary cause is lack of job training, an underdeveloped knowledge base, and lack of education (especially technical education). The long-term unemployed people need to get to work, start reading books and technical manuals, go to night school, get out there and get job training and education, take advantage of government-funded job training programs, and stop sitting around watching stupid television shows for 5 hours every day. (I heard recently that the average American watches TV for five hours per day; that's just incredible to me because most TV shows are so dumb. I only watch sports and a few outstanding shows and average about 8 hours of TV per week.) It's a lot of work being a student and educating yourself. I know because I've been there. I went to college for six years and earned two degrees. Since college I've retrained myself twice and spent a lot of time reading books, learning how to write computer software, and upgrading my knowledge base. It was tiring at times, but it has paid off very well and unemployed people can do the same thing if they have the drive and ambition.