Government
The Geography of the 47%
The states with the highest share of tax non-payers may actually contain the very conservative votes that Romney needs.
Following the big Mother Jones release of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's hidden-camera comment on the "47 percent" of Americans "who will vote for the president no matter what," my colleague at The Atlantic, David Graham, posted an article Monday looking at the real "47 percent." Using the Tax Foundation's data on 2008's income tax non-payers (people who filed a tax return but did not actually owe federal income taxes), he found that the states with the highest rates tended to be traditionally Republican states. Graham writes:
Derek Thompson, another Atlantic colleague, followed up on Graham's post with this analysis: