During an interview with CNN’s Soledad O’Brien, Mitt Romny offered this observation: “I’m not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there. If it needs repair, I’ll fix it.
It was not the first part of this shabby comment that I found so odd. Why, after all, would a Republican candidate for president be concerned about the very poor? It was the part about fixing the safety net if it needed repairs. What’s that one all about? Its something someone really should ask the guy.
The reason is that this safety net is unraveling before our eyes. A combination of cutbacks in such programs as food stamps and Medicaid, either directly via less funding flowing to states from Washington, or indirectly by raising eligibility standards, is doing a death of a thousand cuts on literally millions of those “very poor.”
And what is Romney’s plan to “fix” things here? To date, his fixing ideas seem to run in tandem with current Republican orthodoxy. Keep trimming the safety net bit by bit to reduce deficits, but cut taxes of rich in hopes they will trickle down safety net job replacements.
Maybe I’m wrong here. Maybe Romney is secretly a Jack Kemp-style compassionate conservative. But until he says something, anything, that shows this to be the case, I think he’s just a guy who is unwittingly cruel, and for someone who might land in the White House, tragically out of touch.
More from this writer at: wallstreetpoet.com