
Mitt Romney & the 47%
Mitt Romney's 2012 comment that 47 percent of Americans see themselves as government dependents becomes the prompt for a round of interviews on the streets of Atlanta. This is the first episode of the web series Leveraged Information, and the format is simple: put a microphone in front of ordinary people and let them react. Responses range from defensive to angry to dismissive, covering welfare, taxes, and what dependency actually means to people who might be counted in that 47 percent. There is no host narration steering the conversation and no rebuttal footage of Romney himself, just a sequence of unscripted opinions from residents reacting to a single soundbite that dominated that election cycle. The episode's value is in the rawness of those street-level reactions rather than any analysis layered on top of them.