Paul Krugman: Romney Isn’t Concerned

Who does Romney care about?:

Romney Isn’t Concerned, by Paul Krugman, Commentary, NY Times: ...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... But he quite clearly did mean what he said. ...

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 ... because of the cost of a huge bureaucracy “very little of the money that’s actually needed by those that really need help ... actually reaches them.”

This claim, like much of what Mr. Romney says, was completely false:... between 90 percent and 99 percent of the dollars allocated to safety-net programs do, in fact, reach the beneficiaries. ...

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

Now, the truth is that ... Mr. Romney ... wants to make the safety net weaker... 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. ...

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? ...

Mr. Romney’s tax plan would actually raise taxes on many lower-income Americans, while ... 80 percent of the tax cuts would go to people making more than $200,000 a year..., 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...: 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.