[Vision2020] Romney Isn’t Concerned

[Art Deco]

  [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>


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February 2, 2012
Romney Isn’t Concerned By PAUL
KRUGMAN<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/paulkrugman/index.html?inline=nyt-per>

If you’re an American down on your luck, Mitt Romney has a message for you:
He doesn’t feel your pain. Earlier this week, Mr. Romney told a startled
CNN interviewer, “I’m not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety
net there.”

Faced with criticism, the candidate has claimed that he didn’t mean what he
seemed to mean, and that his words were taken out of context. But he quite
clearly did mean what he said. And the more context you give to his
statement, the worse it gets.

First of all, just a few days ago, Mr. Romney was denying that the very
programs he now says take care of the poor actually provide any significant
help. On Jan. 22, he asserted that safety-net programs — yes, he
specifically used that term — have “massive overhead,” and that because of
the cost of a huge bureaucracy “very little of the money that’s actually
needed by those that really need help, those that can’t care for
themselves, actually reaches them.”

This claim, like much of what Mr. Romney says, was completely false: U.S.
poverty programs have nothing like as much bureaucracy and overhead as,
say, private health insurance companies. As the Center on Budget and Policy
Priorities has documented, between 90 percent and 99 percent of the dollars
allocated to safety-net programs do, in fact, reach the beneficiaries. But
the dishonesty of his initial claim aside, how could a candidate declare
that safety-net programs do no good and declare only 10 days later that
those programs take such good care of the poor that he feels no concern for
their welfare?

Also, given this whopper about how safety-net programs actually work, how
credible was Mr. Romney’s assertion, after expressing his lack of concern
about the poor, that if the safety net needs a repair, “I’ll fix it”?

Now, the truth is that the safety net does need repair. It provides a lot
of help to the poor, but not enough. Medicaid, for example, provides
essential health care to millions of unlucky citizens, children especially,
but many people still fall through the cracks: among Americans with annual
incomes under $25,000, more than a quarter — 28.7 percent — don’t have any
kind of health insurance. And, no, they can’t make up for that lack of
coverage by going to emergency rooms.

Similarly, food aid programs help a lot, but one in six Americans living
below the poverty line suffers from “low food security.” This is officially
defined as involving situations in which “food intake was reduced at times
during the year because [households] had insufficient money or other
resources for food” — in other words, hunger.

So we do need to strengthen our safety net. Mr. Romney, however, wants to
make the safety net weaker instead.

Specifically, the candidate has endorsed Representative Paul Ryan’s plan
for drastic cuts in federal spending — with almost two-thirds of the
proposed spending cuts coming at the expense of low-income Americans. To
the extent that Mr. Romney has differentiated his position from the Ryan
plan, it is in the direction of even harsher cuts for the poor; his
Medicaid proposal appears to involve a 40 percent reduction in financing
compared with current law.

So Mr. Romney’s position seems to be that we need not worry about the poor
thanks to programs that he insists, falsely, don’t actually help the needy,
and which he intends, in any case, to destroy.

Still, I believe Mr. Romney when he says he isn’t concerned about the poor.
What I don’t believe is his assertion that he’s equally unconcerned about
the rich, who are “doing fine.” After all, if that’s what he really feels,
why does he propose showering them with money?

And we’re talking about a lot of money. According to the nonpartisan Tax
Policy Center, Mr. Romney’s tax plan would actually raise taxes on many
lower-income Americans, while sharply cutting taxes at the top end. More
than 80 percent of the tax cuts would go to people making more than
$200,000 a year, almost half to those making more than $1 million a year,
with the average member of the million-plus club getting a $145,000 tax
break.

And these big tax breaks would create a big budget hole, increasing the
deficit by $180 billion a year — and making those draconian cuts in
safety-net programs necessary.

Which brings us back to Mr. Romney’s lack of concern. You can say this for
the former Massachusetts governor and Bain Capital executive: He is opening
up new frontiers in American politics. Even conservative politicians used
to find it necessary to pretend that they cared about the poor. Remember
“compassionate conservatism”? Mr. Romney has, however, done away with that
pretense.

At this rate, we may soon have politicians who admit what has been obvious
all along: that they don’t care about the middle class either, that they
aren’t concerned about the lives of ordinary Americans, and never were.

  [image: DCSIMG]


-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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