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Two Days Later, Romney Gives Up Defending Comments About The Poor: ‘I Misspoke’
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/201...oor-i-mispoke/
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Yes, he MISSPOKE/EXPOSED his/Repug/VRWC/conservative TRUE sociopathic strategy towards the 99%
Well we wouldn't have to worry about that interest if poor people would stop having babies... [/WC]
Two Days Later, Romney Gives Up Defending Comments About The Poor: ‘I Misspoke’
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/201...oor-i-mispoke/
==========
Yes, he MISSPOKE/EXPOSED his/Repug/VRWC/conservative TRUE sociopathic strategy towards the 99%
Krugman trashing 0.01%er Willard Gecko
Romney Isn’t Concerned
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 do ented, 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.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/03/op...d.html?_r=2&hp
You gotta love it.
Poor babies, all they got is Carter, Clinton and Obama to crow about.
And their prize or prizes has just about destroyed the nation and they
want to harp on Reagan.
Hang in there sunshine(s). You may learn what is really going on in this
world one of these days.
XZ, you don't even know when you're been -slapped .... with your own hand.
More Repug "compassionate conservatism" and "free market solutoins to everything":
Santorum Tells Sick Kid Not To Complain About $1 Million Drug Costs Because People Pay $900 For An IPad
GOP contender Rick Santorum had a heated exchange with a mother and her sick young son Wednesday, arguing that drug companies were en led to charge whatever the market demanded for life-saving therapies.[...]
“People have no problem paying $900 for an iPad,” Santorum said, “but paying $900 for a drug they have a problem with — it keeps you alive. Why? Because you’ve been conditioned to think health care is something you can get without having to pay for it.”
The mother said the boy was on the drug Abilify, used to treat schizophrenia, and that, on paper, its costs would exceed $1 million each year.
http://thinkprogress.org/health/2012...0-for-an-ipad/
being honest dont mean when it comes to votes, where a majority are ppl earning check to check
"If you’re an American down on your luck,Mitt Romney has a message for you: He doesn’t feel your pain."
The DNC 's spin on this is lame for two main reasons. First because its completely out of context. Mostly however its because this is the narrative that our elections are decided on. What policies about the poor or middle class are we talking about here?
Most of us have no idea and they want it that way. We fall right into the trap.
He also was head of the actors' UNION!
http://www.sag.org/ronald-reagan
The repugnants get what they deserve.
Just another notch closer to clinching the nomination.....which he already has.
Poll: Low-income Republicans say do more for poor
A significant portion of low-income Republicans might not embrace Mitt Romney’s comment this week that he is “not concerned about the very poor” because they have government programs that serve as a safety net, according to recent polls.
About a quarter of Republican and Republican-leaning registered voters have annual family incomes less than $30,000,
the majority of Republicans that fall in this lowest income category, 57 percent, believe that the government doesn’t do enough to help the poor. Only 18 percent of this group said the government does too much to help the poor, while 21 percent said government aid for the poor is at the right amount.
Meanwhile, 44 percent of Republicans that have annual family incomes of $75,000 or more said the amount of federal aid for the poor is excessive, while only 21 percent said it is not enough.
Also, lower-income Republicans have a markedly different view about the fairness of the economic system than higher-income Republicans – 51 percent of Republicans with an annual income of less than $30,000 said in a December poll that the country’s economic system unfairly favors the wealthy, while just 28 percent of Republicans with an annual income $75,000 or more said the same.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories...#ixzz1lXGyAJZZ
and yet, these sub $30K-Repugs will reliably vote for Repugs and therefore against their own best interests. dumb s, probably single-issue-voters-no-matter-what, issues like Guns, Gays, God, Abortion, and kill-all-Muslims.
The whole comment is probably taken more than a little out of context.
In context though, his illusion that we have a social safety net worth a that doens't need fixing right now is telling.
We perpetuate poverty in this country by short-changing the children of people with low incomes in so many ways it makes me a bit ill thinking about it.
Leading the charge is the right wing War on the Poor, in which people who like to feel better about themselves at the expense of others take on an air of false piousness, "the poor are only poor because they make bad choices and are somehow morally weak/flawed".
This then becomes the excuse to cut back on the social safety net and anything that might have a whiff of "wealth transfer", God forbid it break the poverty cycle.
He has explained his comments about not worrying about the poor because of the safety net. He said he is worried about the middle class losing numbers to the poor, and want the poor to become middle class. I don't remember his exact words, but yes. It was really blown out of proportion.
"because of the safety net"
which is the tiest, hole-iest of any industrial country, to say nothing of Americans working longer per year than any European country, and with the punitive 2 weeks/year vacation.
Repug/conservative social/economic Darwinism at its very best.
BS, the man no idea what it is like to be poor and he did not misspeak. I don't think he can even relate to the middle class as he has always been above them. Misspoke my ass.
I think Obama donated about 1% of his income to charity last year. Romney gave about 40%. Biden gave a few hundred dollars.
"Romney gave about 40%."
You Lie
His numbers are off, but the point he's trying to illustrate isn't. People are trying to villify the rich by saying they're money-grubbing s, when in fact there are extremely generous and philanthropic people with money. Romney paid the taxes he owed and faithfully hed to his church. The democratic leaders want to talk about more taxes to help the poor, but how much did they give in charitable contributions to groups that support the cause? It's a fundamental difference in philosophy; let rich people be philanthropic on their own or get pennies on the dollar for their contributions by taxing the of them and letting an inefficient government distribute their wealth.
"extremely generous and philanthropic people with money"
tax deductible, and negotiating all kinds of private deductions with IRS.
Most charities, eg Komen, are scams, and probably hire members of the the donors' families with salaries in the $100Ks.
And Willard fires his debate coach who got him where he is today? What an idiot.
I would say the redistribution is pretty damn efficient when it happens and nothing stimulates the economy better than increasing benefits to the poor and unemployed...that's why the greedy 1% is short-sighted, give the poor money in benefits and with the multiplier effect of money, the greedy corporate robber-barons make more money too..
Not everyone wants to vilify the rich as most would like to be rich but more of a position of fairness. There is a difference.
So now you're suggesting that people get taxed on income they give away to organizations voluntarily? And you're also attacking an organization that is researching a cure for cancer?
There's all kinds of fail in just your short response.
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