Politics & Power Quote by Mitt Romney

Dependency is framed here not as a policy outcome but as a moral hazard: a slow-acting toxin that dissolves character. Romney’s line works because it smuggles a cultural judgment inside an economic argument. “Initiative,” “risk-taking,” and “opportunity” are the holy trinity of American self-mythology; by declaring dependency “death” to them, he turns government assistance into an existential threat to national identity, not just a budget line item.

The phrasing is doing political jujitsu. “Government dependency” collapses a wide range of programs and circumstances - unemployment after a recession, disability, wage stagnation, the cost of health care - into a single, stigmatized category. The subtext: people who need help are being trained into passivity, and the state is the trainer. That construction quietly shifts attention away from employers, markets, and structural volatility, placing the locus of blame on individual behavior and the public sector.

Context matters. In the post-2008 landscape, “dependency” became a high-voltage conservative keyword: a way to criticize the Obama-era expansion of social supports while casting the debate as one about dignity rather than redistribution. “Fight it like the poison it is” amplifies the urgency and invites an us-versus-them posture: dependency isn’t a tradeoff to manage, it’s contamination to purge. The rhetoric is clean and combustible, designed to make compassion feel like complicity and to make cutting programs sound like rescue.