so says Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman in this column from this morning whose title I appropriated for this post.
I am surprised that I could not find a post on it.
It totally takes apart Romney's claim that his words were taken out of context. As Krugman notes
he quite clearly did mean what he said. And the more context you give to his statement, the worse it gets.
For example, on Romney's assertion that if the safety net is broken he would fix it, Krugman reminds us
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.”
That statement is, as Krugman points out, dishonest, since poverty programs have nothing like the overhead of private insurance companies, spending 90 to 95% of their funding on services, while insurance companies are, might I remind people, balking at the provision of the Affordable Care Act that 85% of premiums be returned in benefits. But to put it simply, as does Krugman,
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?
Please keep reading.
I am not going to recapitulate the entire column.
You should read the column. Krugman does not need any explanation of his words from me.
You should bookmark it, to have it ready when anyone tries to claim that Romney cares.
You might consider passing it on now via social media and email.
Besides, as Krugman notes, Romney cannot be taken seriously when he suggests he might be willing to strengthen the social safety net:
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.
Krugman is equally harsh on the part of the Romney statement where he says he is not concerned about the very rich - why then do his tax proposals provide those super rich with even more money at the expense of everyone else, while putting a huge whole in the federal budget?
By now anyone who is regular denizen of this website is quite aware how facilely Romney tells untruths and flip-flops according to his perception of what words might benefit his candidacy.
He is quite likely even less concerned about most Americans than a President who ran on the phrase "compassionate conversatism" but then told the Al Smith dinner that those there, whom others called the rich and the super rich, he called his base.
As Krugman noted, Bush at least pretended to care. And Romney? Let me let the columnist speak for himself:
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.
He got that right. The only question is whether a sufficient number of Americans will grasp that so that despite the splurge of funding from other superwealthy on his behalf the American people have sense enough to reject Romney before he does to the country what at Bain Capital he did to too many companies, communities, and their people.