Radical!

A year ago I would have said that the Republican party could not possibly move any further to the right.  After all, here was a party that had invented the individual mandate for health care in the 1990s, and now believed it to be akin to fascism.  A party whose leader in 2001 refused to blame Muslims for 9/11, but was now in fierce opposition to the building of a mosque two blocks and around the corner from the WTC site.  A party that had a nearly maximalist position on abortion.

But then the 2012 presidential primaries started, and I found out I was wrong.  Think about the new positions being staked out, not by fringe candidates, but by the frontrunners for the nomination:

• Rick Santorum isn't just against abortion, he's against contraception.
• Mitt Romney's new tax plan calls for a 20% tax cut on top of the Bush tax cuts
• Rick Santorum's tax cut is even bigger
• Santorum's criticism of Romney's tax plan is that it borrows too much from Occupy Wall Street, presumably because the top 1% still pay something.
• Supporting Israel isn't enough anymore; now Republicans are expected to absolutely support every policy and practice of the Israeli government, unless they can figure out a way to be even tougher than the Israeli government wants to be.

I've said this before; the Republican party has turned so far right that it's just staggering.  And this isn't about "polarization" in a neutral sense- Democrats have not made a similar turn to the left.  I've challenged some Republican friends to come up with one issue on which Democrats are now further to the left than they were in 2000 other than gay rights/gay marriage.  I've never heard an answer.

"Obama Derangement Syndrome" seems to have overtaken the right.  Hell, as soon as Michelle Obama began her campaign against childhood obesity, much of the Republican establishment started criticizing her while proudly eating high-fat foods.  These guys are crazy!

A Quick Point about Mitt

Lots of chatter about Mitt Romney's insistence that the US shouldn't have bailed out the auto industry.  He's getting hammered for this, as he should, seeing as the bailout has been a smashing success by any measure.  But one point is getting lost here- Romney's disingenuousness.

I know, I know- Romney is disingenuous all the time, so it's hard to call him out on it constantly.  But this is what I mean here: If Mitt Romney had been present in 2009, and in the same situation as Obama, he would have done the same thing as Obama.  He would have studied the situation, he would have seen that there was no funding for an ordered bankruptcy, and he would have bailed out the industry for the same reasons the Obama administration did it.

He just can't admit it now, because anything Obama does immediately becomes Socialist in RepublicanLand.

...In Which I Try to be Fair to Conservatives on Health Care

I was thinking about the health care debate this week, in light of this article someone sent me about the failures of ObamaCare and the private sector improvements that are coming about (in spite of health care reform presumably) to make insurance more affordable.

I'm certainly ready to agree that ObamaCare is imperfect in a lot of ways, but I'd frame it in the sense that the problem is that it doesn't solve enough of the current problems our system has, rather than that it creates new problems.

But here's what it boils down to: liberals have a goal of universal coverage for health care. To reach that goal (or get close to it- ObamaCare gets close), it is necessary to make some sort of major change involving increased government involvement. ObamaCare changes the health care system as minimally as possible within the frame of reaching its goal.

Conservatives are aghast at the increased role of government- which is fair enough. But of course Conservatives also don't share the goal of universal, affordable health care for everyone. They feel that the downside of increased government isn't worth the upside of insuring everyone.

So there's a stalemate, but it's not really an argument about the technocratic outcomes or unintended consequences of legislation. It's not about a secret Democratic party plan to turn the whole country into a socialist dystopia. It's not about a secret Republican plan to ensure poor people die off faster. It's just about priorities. I care about all Americans having access to health insurance more than I care about government control of my life.  It seems that Conservatives feel the opposite.

 

Yet when I suggest such a formulation, in which I think I'm being fair to Conservatives and their sincere urge to keep government as small as possible, I get pushback- "what do you mean, we don't want universal coverage? Of course we do!"

 

But that's ridiculous- many of the ideas that Conservatives throw out there to improve the health care system in America are fine, good thoughts, which really might improve things- increased competition, less opaque payment systems, making sure consumers see prices, malpractice reform, etc.  These proposals are just fine, and would probably lead to more efficiency and lower prices for many of us.  But none of these ideas would do anything to ensure universal coverage.  People who work in low paying jobs for companies that don't offer health insurance would still be out in the cold.  People with pre-existing conditions would still have nowhere to turn for affordable coverage.  Remember there are 50 million uninsured people in the US.  Go with these Conservative ideas and maybe some small percentage of them would be able to afford it, but the vast majority still wouldn't.

 

We should at least have honest debates.  There's no way to make health insurance accessible to everyone without lots of government action.  It's still perfectly legitimate to oppose universal health care- government doesn't provide universal automobiles for everyone, for example, so maybe health care shouldn't be provided either- but let's dispense with the pretension that Conservative plans would produce health care for all. 

Supposedly Respectable Conservatives Going Over the Cliff

Pres Obama took office in 2009

Wow.  Someone sent me this piece from Peter Ferrara at Forbes magazine:

The record of President Obama’s first three years in office is in, and nothing that happens now can go back and change that. What that record shows is that President Obama, with his throwback, old-fashioned, 1970s Keynesian economics, has put America through the worst recovery from a recession since the Great Depression.

I told my correspondent who sent me this that I was planning to parse the piece on this blog, but reading it just exhausts me- it's so densely packed with poor reasoning, misleading arguments, and the like that I can barely face it.  But I'll give it a try, and see if I can slog through the whole thing.

Ferrara starts by noting that

What that history reveals is that before this last recession, since the Great Depression recessions in America have lasted an average of 10 months, with the longest previously lasting 16 months.

He then notes that Obama entered office when "the recession was in its 13th month", i.e. it was already over the average and only three months from the record before he was even in office.  In the end the recession lasted 18 months- i.e. it was over five months after Obama took office.  What could a president possibly do in his first five months in office that would improve that?  Ferrara goes on to take some gratuitous shots at Keynesian theory, which doesn't really merit a response from me- there aren't any facts to respond to.  But he also goes over lots of legitimate stats about how weak the recovery has been, and how unemployment continues to be at a very high level.

Ferrara notes that economists say that recessions resulting from financial crises are worse than other recessions, but then completely ignores that point when talking about how great Ronald Reagan's recovery was compared to Obama's.  But of course the recession of the late '70s was wholly a creation of the Federal Reserve Bank, intentionally inflicted to beat back inflation, and followed during the Reagan years by lowering interest rates.

What's needed when one criticizes the results of government policy, moreover, is to create a narrative explaining what should have been done.  Without explaining the mistakes, you don't have a credible argument and you're just left repeating the same thing- "look at the results!  Lalalalalalalala!"  I didn't see much of that until later in the piece.  But think about the issue with respect to the 1980s vs. the 2008 recession- tax rates are lower now than they were then.  Hell, Reagan increased taxes later in the decade!  Where's the explanation of what Reagan did right that BHO did wrong?  Instead we get this:

Indeed, exactly none of President Obama’s policies have been well designed to restore economic recovery and traditional American prosperity. They have consistently been the opposite of everything that Reagan did to end the American decline of the 1970s, and restore booming growth for 25 years.

Wow!  The opposite of Reagan!  That's serious!  I wonder what he means by that?  Sorry, the reader can keep wondering, because there's not a single example given.  The writer goes on to talk about the looming tax increases in 2013 and how they're going to really screw us up.  But of course that just points out again that taxes have been cut during the Obama years so far- the Magic Reagan Formula- and these are the results.

So next comes the Jeremiad against the tax rates scheduled to increase in 2013, tax rates that are essentially the same as existed during the Clinton years, which coincided with greater prosperity than was ever seen in the 2000s during the last conservative Golden Age.

Finally there's a screed about how "the Obama administration is in the process of imposing a blizzard of new regulatory costs and barriers that will be building to a crescendo by 2013 as well".  The examples given are Dodd-Frank (not yet implemented significantly) and the Health Care bill (also not yet implemented).  No examples of any expansion of regulation so far- so how is it that we've had this terrible recovery?  Taxes are lower, regulation hasn't changed.  The one thing that conservatives usually criticize, the exploding deficit, isn't mentioned here- I guess even a cynical hack like Ferrara can't bring himself to blame the lack of growth on a defict, which clearly has nothing to do with it.

And of course we know that the President is going to get the credit or blame for whatever happens in the economy, but supposed intellectuals writing for highbrow magazines ought to at least acknowledge that in fact presidents don't have absolute power and can't dictate policy- that's why it takes more than a view from 50,000 feet to explain why a recovery isn't taking hold.  Why not?  Would it be different if Congress had passed the jobs bill Obama proposed last year?  Did the Republicans propose something in particular that would have helped?  I guess Ferrara would say that we should have cut taxes more, but that argument is patently ridiculous given that the US currently has the lowest tax rates it's had since WW II, which didn't stop the recession from rocking us badly.

Anyway, what a piece of drivel.

UPDATE: This piece by Jon Chait makes some of these same points.

The Panama Canal and the Case for Government to Do Stuff

I've been reading David McCullough's book about the Panama Canal.  It's not a politically partisan book or anything, and I haven't been thinking about it in the context of today's political debate.  But now, toward the end of the book, he describes how some commentators of the time were critical of the Socialist nature of the enterprise.

The Panama Canal was started by a French consortium in the 1870s, funded by stock bought by investors both big and small.  It failed spectacularly for many reasons including poor decisions made by the main visionary who insisted on building a sea-level canal even though a lock canal was plainly required.  But even with better decisions, it seems that the task was just too big for the private sector to accomplish.

So the US government, driven by President Teddy Roosevelt, took it over and built the canal.  The enterprise could not have been more controlled by government- all the engineers and workers were employed directly by the US government, which built company housing, hospitals, social clubs, owned the railroad, and owned the steamship line that brought workers back and forth.  And it worked out pretty well.

This isn't an argument against Capitalism- it's just to make the point that some things can't be accomplished by private enterprise and sometimes the government is all that's left to do it.  Properly administered, governments are capable of great things like the building of the Panama Canal, which has benefited the world economy many times over.  So I don't want my government owning the auto companies, but then again in 2009 that industry was failing, and it required the government to bail the auto companies out- nobody else could do it.

The Iranian Threat

From Matt Taibbi:

Virtually all of the Iran stories of late have contained some version of this sort of rhetorical sophistry. The news “hook” in most all of these stories is that intelligence reports reveal Iran is “willing” to attack us or go to war – but then there’s usually an asterisk next to the headline, and when you follow the asterisk, it reads something like, “In the event that we attack Iran first.”

This builds on this Glenn Greenwald piece I've discussed before.

I’ll just note that she [Erin Burnett on CNN] begins her remarks by announcing that “no one buys Iran’s claim that its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes,” and to prove her point, she immediately introduces footage of yesterday’s Congressional testimony by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper which, she said, “drove that message home.” Except the clip then showed Clapper saying this: “Iran’s technical advances . . . strengthen our assessment that Iran is more than capable of producing enough highly enriched uranium for a weapon if its political leaders, specifically the Supreme Leader himself, choose to do so.” Is there really not a single brain in the entire CNN apparatus that stirs in the presence of a contradiction this glaring that it virtually screams its demand to be recognized? And that’s to say nothing of the fact that Leon Panetta just yesterday said “the intelligence does not show that they’ve made the decision to proceed with developing a nuclear weapon,” a fact that Burnett did not manage to mention, even though the same fact was also expressed last month by Israeli officials (“The Israeli view is that while Iran continues to improve its nuclear capabilities, it has not yet decided whether to translate these capabilities into a nuclear weapon”).

Look, I'm not a pacifist.  I am willing to consider that an attack on Iran may be necessary.  But I'd at least like to see a sober analysis in the media of what's going on.  The US is a huge threat to Iran and its government- the statements from US government officials and talking heads in the media make it pretty clear that we're considering armed belligerance against them.  To then turn around and be outraged that Iranians may be considering defending themselves if we attack is just nuts.

The "axis of evil" government that is the safest from US attacks is North Korea.  Why?  Because they have a nuclear bomb!  Iran is a terrible regime with plans to destroy Israel and anyone else they can, but their attempt to get The Bomb is completely sane- considering our rhetoric, it's the best guarantee the regime could have that we won't pull an Iraq on them and send in the Marines.

Choices, Choices...... and Dilemnas

I was talking this week with a young woman I know who is a political neophyte.  She knows she is a Conservative, as her father is conservative and she senses he is right about stuff, but she's just contemplating getting more educated and figuring out why she feels the way she does (I hope that doesn't seem mocking at all, because it's not intended to be- we all start someplace politically, for no better reasons than what she has). 

Anyway, we were talking about entitlements, and she talked about how we "can't afford" the Social Security and Medicare benefits that we are promising right now.  This got me to thinking again about the different categories of government spending; there are some things that governments legitimately can't afford, and there are other things that governments and societies decide not to pay for.  And there's a difference between those two.

Greece, for example, is screwed.  They mismanaged their debt so badly, along with a dash of fraud to keep creditors coming a few years too long, and now they're in a hole so deep and wide that there's just no way out.  They can't keep spending what they were spending.  They have to raise much more in taxes than they have been raising.  And the austerity measures needed to get the budget in line are so crushing that they're destroying the entire economy in the country and pushing unemployment to record levels.  They're in a vicious circle in which further austerity just makes the economy worse, which in turn depresses tax receipts and continues the cycle further.  And they're so far in the hole that even Keynesian deficits are totally unsustainable because creditors (rightly) won't fund the deficits.  There's no way out it seems, except for Germany and others to just give them money.  This is an example of stuff "we can't afford".

Back home, on the other hand, we have a looming Medicare and Medicaid crisis.  Health care costs are rising much faster than inflation, and there seems no end in sight to this.  Overall health care spending as a percentage of GDP is rising.  Something has to change.  This is a really hard problem to solve, in that we can raise Medicare and other taxes in the short term, but in the longer term we just have to find a way to stop the explosion of health care costs.  ObamaCare has a commission that is tasked with doing that, though it's hard to predict whether that will work.  Conservatives want to do it by unleashing the free market, but Liberals point out that health care is already a free market in the US, one that seems to work differently from, say, the auto market. (Picture you're going for a knee replacement, and you get a marketing call from another hospital offering to do the same surgery for 25% less money.  Would you do it?  Most people wouldn't take those sorts of risks when it comes to their health, so they trust doctors to decide- it just doesn't work the same).  So this crisis is really hard to solve, but not impossible.

Then you have the problems that are easy to solve- we just have to decide how to do it.  Social Security is my favorite example.  Baby Boomers are retiring, the population is getting older, the ratio of workers to retirees is getting worse, and the math no longer works for making Social Security solvent in the long term.  This isn't because of bad government or poor administration- it's just demographics.  But the good news is that we have a huge buffet full of possible solutions!  We can:

1. Cut benefits to retirees by a modest amount
2. Raise SS taxes in all our paychecks
3. Raise the ceiling so that rich people pay more SS taxes while leaving the rest of us unchanged
4. Increase the retirement age
5. Make SS means-tested so rich people don't get benefits
6. Some combination of any of these

There are probably more solutions I haven't thought of too.  And I hate some of these solutions (4, 5) and would fight hard against them.  But Social Security fits clearly in the category of stuff that has a solution.  We just have to pick one of the plans and implement it.

I Don't Hate Scott Brown

Alright, I admit it.  Although I'm very liberal and very partisan in my politics, I find Scott Brown quite unobjectionable.  He doesn't talk like a fire-breathing radical, he occasionally votes with Democrats, and he seems like a thoughtful character.

But that doesn't mean I'm voting for him.  It's not that I'm unable to vote for any Republican (OK, maybe it's that too).  But first of all, Elizabeth Warren stands where I stand on the issues (Scott Brown is against any financial regulation of Wall Street, for example).  Most importantly though, he's a vote for Mitch McConnell for Senate Majority Leader, and he's a vote for very conservative Supreme Court justices.

So if I comment on the Warren-Brown race in the next few months, I hope to take it easy on Scott Brown and avoid calling him names that should be reserved for the really crazy (Hello, Michelle Bachman) and cynically evil (that's you, Newt) in the GOP.

Is It Only Called Terror When Someone Does It To Us?

This is just so disturbing:

On December 30 of last year, ABC News reported on a 16-year-old Pakistani boy, Tariq Khan, who was killed with his 12-year-old cousin when a car in which he was riding was hit with a missile fired by a U.S. drone. As I noted at the time, the report contained this extraordinary passage buried in the middle:

Asked for documentation of Tariq and Waheed’s deaths, Akbar did not provide pictures of the missile strike scene. Virtually none exist, since drones often target people who show up at the scene of an attack.

What made that sentence so amazing was that it basically amounts to a report that the U.S. first kills people with drones, then fires on the rescuers and others who arrive at the scene where the new corpses and injured victims lie.
In a just-released, richly documented report, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, on behalf of the Sunday Times, documents that this is exactly what the U.S. is doing — and worse...

Greenwald goes on to describe in intimate and devestating detail how our US government is guilty of war crimes, right now, in our ongoing drone campaign.  He later laments the fact that current public opinion, even among Liberals, continues to favor drone attacks in spite of the overwhelming opinion against such attacks when undertaken by the Bush campaign.

I can't really add much to Greenwald's analysis, but I'm struck as he is by how alienated from mainstream opinion one is when opposing torture and terror actions by our own government.

Imagine if you can that you are an innocent citizen of the US, minding your own business, when a missile launched by another government lands in your front yard and kills your whole family.  We actually don't have to try very hard to imagine it, as it's not too far away from what happened on 9/11 to us.  We are perpetrating terror attacks via drone that are experienced in exactly the same way by citizens of the countries who are victimized by these actions.  Our only justification is that we're the most powerful country in the world and therefore nobody can stop us.  There's just nothing else there.

President Obama, like President Bush before him, is guilty of War Crimes.  And since nobody in a position of power here is willing to say so, it's going to continue.  Ron Paul is the only person speaking against this to whom anyone is listening.  It's shameful.  In November, I'll be forced to choose between Obama, whom I see as a war criminal, and Romney, whose criticism in these areas is that he's not tough enough.  Awful.

Wall Street Profits Down!

This article in New York magazine really struck me.  Key quote:

With all the major banks unable to wager their own funds on big bets [due to Dodd-Frank], there’s a growing sense that the money that was being made during the Bush boom won’t be back. “The government has strangled the financial system,” banking analyst Dick Bove told me recently. “We’ve basically castrated these companies. They can’t borrow as much as they used to borrow.”

... On Wall Street, the misery index is as high as it’s been since brokers were on window ledges back in 1929. But sentiments like that, accompanied by a full orchestra of the world’s tiniest violins, are only part of the conversation in Wall Street offices and trading desks. Along with the complaint is something that might be called soul-searching—which is, in itself, a surprising development. Since the crash, and especially since the occupation of Zuccotti Park last September (which does appear to have rattled a lot of nerves), there has been a growing recognition on Wall Street that the system that had provided those million-dollar bonuses was built on a highly unstable foundation. Disagreeable as it may be, goes this thinking, bankers have to go back to first principles, assess their value in the economy, and take their part in its rebuilding. No one on Wall Street liked to be scapegoated either by the Obama administration or by the Occupiers. But many acknowledge that the bubble­-bust-bubble seesaw of the past decades isn’t the natural order of capitalism—and that the compensation arrangements just may have been a bit out of whack. “There’s no other industry where you could get paid so much for doing so little,” a former Lehman trader said. Paul Volcker, whose eponymous rule is at the core of the changes, echoes an idea that more bankers than you’d think would agree with. “Finance became a self-justification,” he told me recently. “They made a lot of money trading with each other with doubtful public benefit.”

It's a long article and a great read, and goes on to note that the big investment banks are closing down their proprietary trading departments, the ones that basically acted like hedge funds, and their "star traders" are quitting to start their own hedge funds because the rules don't allow the big banks to take the kinds of risks that produce 8-figure annual salaries.  This makes sense to me- Too Big To Fail banks shouldn't act like risky hedge funds, because as we saw in 2008, when they fail they take too much collateral damage along with them.

I first read the article as sort of neutral reporting, or even a bit of a Liberal take.  Near the end there are quotes from various Wall Street leaders in favor of higher taxes on their huge salaries, and little in opposition to that.
Matt Taibbi reads it this way:

But in reality? Please. Wall Street people complain a lot, but in the last six months, the grave impact of Dodd-Frank on bonuses hasn’t even been within ten miles of the things these people are really panicked about. The comments I’ve heard have been more like, "My asshole has been puckered completely shut for four months in a row over this Europe business," or, "If the ECB doesn’t come up with a Greek bailout package, I’m going to have to sell my children for dog food."
Bonuses are indeed down this year, especially when compared with the bonuses of recent years, but let’s be clear about why. It has nothing to do with Dodd-Frank. We can posit three other factors:
1. Banks have unfortunately had to give up the practice of simply printing trillions of dollars out of thin air by selling off worthless mortgages for huge profits and/or making millions of synthetic copies of those same worthless mortgage assets;
2. After twice being saved from the execution chamber by Ben Bernanke’s Quantitative Easing programs, which printed trillions of new dollars and injected them straight into Wall Street’s arm, Wall Street was rocked this summer when Helicopter Ben decided to temporarily forestall QE3;
3. Europe, a slightly more than minor factor in the global financial picture, is imploding, causing mass hoarding of assets all over the world, severely impacting the business of investment banks everywhere. 

I don't know what's right.  But to me lower profits on Wall Street are a feature, not a bug.  That's not because I hate rich people, or because I'm jealous.  It's because the enormous profits on Wall Street happened because of the enormous risks being taken, and when it came crashing down taxpayers took the hit.  Individualized gains and socialized losses don't work.

So if Dodd-Frank is the reason for Wall Street whining, then I give it three cheers.

The Deserving Poor

 Matt Yglesias has a blog post here that interested me.  It says in part:

If you arrange your society such that 5% of the population is going to occupy some extremely unpleasant social roles, it may well be the case that the specific people who come to occupy those roles do so for specific behavioral reasons that are outside the scope of what we'd commonly call "bad luck."

...[But] Someone or other is destined to be the "marginal worker" in any labor pool, and if the central bank conducts this kind of asymmetrical stabilzation policy then marginal workers are going to be screwed. If everyone had more human capital or a better work ethic then average living standards might be higher, but someone would still be victimized by a bad arrangement of social institutions

 I would take that a step further; in a capitalist society, even one in which the central bank is acting optimally, there will still be jobs that pay poorly.  Someone has to flip the burgers and clean the toilets and pick the tomatoes, and since those jobs don't require much skill there are plenty of people to do them, and consequently those jobs aren't going to pay much.  And that's fine- there are relative winners and relative losers in life.

But the Right's demonization of the Poor just doesn't make sense.  We have these low-paying jobs, and we need them to be accomplished by someone.  Blaming the working poor for their plight is just stupid- if the janitor starts his own business and becomes rich, someone else is going to have to clean the floors!  And that guy is going to be poor.

Econo-Thoughts

Some thoughts about the good economic news that came out this week.

Job numbers are really good.  The economy is creating jobs at a steady rate in the private sector.  Unemployment, while still high, is coming down.  We can't really say that the economy is booming, but we can say it's recovering.

• If things keep going like this through the year, Obama would be very likely to be re-elected.  Elections can usually be predicted by the economy, and when it's good the incumbent generally gets the credit.
• That doesn't mean that Obama deserves the credit for the economy, of course.  All recessions end, and recoveries always happen eventually, even when the government screws things up.  One fear I've had is that the economy would continue to stink through 2012, leading to a Republican sweep, and then things would improve right on schedule in 2013, just in time for the GOP to claim credit.  Of course, that would have meant that Obama had not succeeded in getting things moving fast enough, so in a sense he would have deserved it.
• In another sense, however, he wouldn't have deserved it, since he's been successfully stymied by Congress from implementing any jobs bills.
• On the other other hand, though, that's a good reason to say that the President doesn't really deserve credit now, since he's been stymied by Congress- one can argue that Washington's inaction has worked out a lot better than proposed actions would have.

Economics is frustrating this way, as good experiments are hard to come by in the real world.  So I return to the standard I've been talking about for a few years now- the one experiment we could identify.  That's the US vs. Europe.  Both went into recession at the same time for similar reasons.  The US did significant stimulus (though not enough according to liberal economists), while Europe did relatively much less stimulus.  Thus far, the US recovery has been quicker and better than just about anywhere in the Eurozone.  Now in fairness, they're dealing with a sovereign debt crisis there, which we don't have here, so it's not a perfect experiment, but nothing is.

Another way to look at it is to note that the Right has been forecasting Doom due to the huge budget deficit and loose money policy of the Fed.  It's clear that we haven't seen that come to pass.  I guess it could still be coming, but I don't think so.

Photo is of Panama Canal workers.  I'm reading the David McCullough book about the canal now, which I highly recommend!

Romney and Concern for the Poor

I've always liked the definition of a political gaffe as when a politician accidentally says something he really believes.  Many have jumped on Mitt Romney for his comment in a CNN interview that he's "not concerned about the poor".  Now this can be taken out of context, no doubt.  Romney went on to clarify that he wasn't concerned about the Poor because "there's a safety net" for them, just as he's not concerned for the Rich because they have money and will be fine.  His point was that the Middle Class is his focus.

And that's a good strategy, since most Americans see themselves as "middle class", even those who are objectively pretty rich (remember the brouhaha from the well-off complaining that there shouldn't be higher taxes on thos making $250,000/year, since "that's not rich!"- never mind that $250K is more than four times the median salary in the US).

But let's be clear about the implications of Mitt's statement.  He's not concerned about the Poor because "there's a safety net".  But in reality that safety net is pretty thin and tattered.  And the GOP's plan is to lower funding for the safety net- if Mitt's elected, the Poor will require a lot more of our concern, since they'll be losing services as government shrinks so we can afford tax cuts for the wealthy.

Hey, that's still a legitimate point- Republicans believe that poor people are at fault for being poor, and safety net programs just encourage them to stay poor.  I think it's wildly inaccurate for Romney to claim that he's "not concerned about the Poor".  Everything in his platform and rhetoric suggestes he's quite concerned about the Poor, because they're mooching off the public trough.  So he's lying about his lack of concern.  But of course lying is just what Mitt does- every time he opens his mouth.