In standing by the substance, if not the tone, of his surreptitiously recorded remarks at a private fund-raiser in May and published on Monday, Mr. Romney waded into an ideological clash pitting two strands of conservative thinking against each other: the longstanding goal of reducing the tax burden on the poor with tax credits versus the growing anxiety that the nation’s “takers” are now overtaking its “makers.”
The statistic Mr. Romney referred to at the fund-raiser came from the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, which published an analysis showing that 46.4 percent of American households did not pay federal income tax in 2011. That statistic shocked many policy elites, small-government populists and members of Congress and has led to conservative hand-wringing.
The households in question consist primarily of the retired, the poor and low-income families with children, according to nonpartisan analysts. Moreover, they do pay taxes, if not income taxes: Just 8 percent of households do not pay payroll or federal income taxes, discounting the elderly.
Mr. Romney stood by his statement in an interview with Neil Cavuto of Fox News on Tuesday. “I think a society based upon a government-centered nation where government plays a larger and larger role, redistributes money, that’s the wrong course for America,” he said, adding that he hoped to improve the economy enough that people would be able to get well-paying jobs and rejoin the tax rolls.
Mr. Romney’s thinking on the matter has been shaped in part by Arthur C. Brooks, the president of the conservative American Enterprise Institute. Mr. Brooks said that he had discussed his new book, “The Road to Freedom: How to Win the Fight for Free Enterprise,” with Mr. Romney, who was particularly interested in whether redistribution would lead to a disengaged electorate — with the government paying for programs benefiting more people with dollars coming from fewer of them.
“It’s not necessarily a good thing for the country that more people are pulling more benefits out of the system than they’re paying in,” Mr. Brooks said in an interview. “That’s not a healthy thing for citizenship, and it’s not good for these people themselves either, if they feel attenuated from their government.”
The notion that too few Americans are paying income taxes has gained currency on the right in recent years. An influential 2002 Wall Street Journal editorial called the millions of American households that do not pay income tax “lucky duckies.” Last year, Erick Erickson, the conservative firebrand, started a Web site called “We Are the 53 Percent,” mocking the 99-percent theme of Occupy Wall Street and chiding Americans for failing to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.
But other Republicans have argued that the focus on the people who do not pay taxes is a mistake.
Reihan Salam, a conservative author, wrote on National Review Online on Tuesday that “the version of conservative tax policy I favor might actually further reduce the share of tax units that pay federal income taxes, yet it would strengthen the work ethic, increase labor force participation, and discourage the kind of dependency that concerns Mitt Romney.”
For a long time, cutting taxes for the poor was a major emphasis of the Republican Party. One reason that many poor people no longer pay federal income taxes is that they qualify for credits such as the earned-income tax credit, which has its roots in conservative thinking and has long been supported by members of both parties as a way to help the poor without increasing welfare payments or raising the minimum wage. The credit was added to the tax code when Gerald Ford was president, and was expanded by Republicans and Democrats, including President Ronald Reagan, who called it “one of the best anti-poverty programs this country has ever seen” in 1986.
President George W. Bush, for his part, doubled the child tax credit, and his tax cuts erased the federal income tax liability for millions of households.
And even as he attacked the entitlements of nontaxpaying households, Mr. Romney has pledged not to raise the share of taxes paid by families making less than $200,000 a year — a promise some analysts say is difficult to square with his proposal to cut tax rates and eliminate tax deductions. And he has proposed eliminating the taxes they pay on interest, dividends and capital gains.
Donald B. Marron Jr., the director of the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, whose analysis Mr. Romney cited on the tape, said the tax code, by design, often aids the working poor. “This is due to longstanding, structural decisions in our tax code,” he said.
In any case, the debate within the Republican Party promises to continue. On Tuesday, many conservatives criticized Mr. Romney’s comments, and some Republican candidates for the Senate distanced themselves from them. Many others said that they supported his underlying ideas.
“There’s something mistaken about his analysis,” David Azerrad of the Heritage Foundation, a right-of-center Washington research group. “But there is something in the substance that points to something correct. There is a shift in our relationship with the government that we’ve witnessed in the past century, with more people ensnared in the tentacles of the welfare state.”
But both political parties have contributed to the growth of entitlement spending, and the benefits have not accrued just to Democratic voters as Mr. Romney suggested on the video.
Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute argues that entitlements are corrupting America in his forthcoming book “A Nation of Takers: America’s Entitlement Epidemic.” But he says that the growth of entitlement spending over the past half century has been greater under Republican administrations than Democratic ones.
“Between 1960 and 2010, the growth of entitlement spending was exponential,” he wrote in arecent excerpt published by The Wall Street Journal, “but in any given year, it was on the whole roughly 8 percent higher if the president happened to be a Republican rather than a Democrat.”
The states with the highest percentage of federal filers who do not owe income taxes tend to vote Republican in presidential elections. An analysis by the Tax Foundation found that in 2008 the state with the highest percentage of federal filers with no tax liability was Mississippi, and that most of the states with the highest percentage of filers with no liability were in the South.
And the politics of who receives help from the government are complex as well. Research by Dean Lacy, a professor of government at Dartmouth College, has found that states that receive more in federal spending than they pay in taxes have become increasingly Republican in presidential elections.
“Since 1984,” he said in an interview Tuesday, “the states that get the most money in federal spending per tax dollar paid have become increasingly Republican.”
Michael Barbaro contributed reporting from Salt Lake City.