Mitt Romney Confirms What His Critics Assumed All Along (ContributorNetwork)

COMMENTARY | The media have been doing backflips since Mitt Romney said on February 1 that "I'm not concerned about the very poor because they have a social safety net in place." Now, I am a fairly liberal person so this may sound coarse, but weren't we already aware of this? A party that became increasingly enthralled with the flat tax early in the nominating process, the party that claims wealth trickles down, and the party of big business doesn't really have any ties to the very poor. During an interview with the New York Times Rick Perry explained his flat tax proposal and when asked about how it might affect income inequality he said he didn't care about income inequality as long as people had jobs.

Now I'm not assigning a value judgement to what Romney said because he didn't say that he hates poor people and he didn't say that all poor people are lazy, as Newt Gingrich seemed to allude to earlier in the campaign. He just said he wasn't concerned about poor people. Now of course there are no shortage of studies that have found poverty to be a bigger problem then Mitt Romney seems to think it is, including the reports from Bloomberg that more than 20 million Americans live in a household with income of less than half the federal and that the portion of the population in that category which is the highest in at least 35 years and has almost doubled since 1975, from 3.7 percent then to 6.7 percent in 2010. Yet the Republican Party as a whole seems to continue to cling on to this belief that the free market, if it were freed from the painful burden that is government oversight and regulation, will be able to sort out these issues.

Capitalism is the greatest system ever devised of creating and spreading wealth, but it is also a system that has winners and losers, which is why it woks so well. It's a kill or be killed system, but in a system where people can benefit so much off of the takeover and downsizing of companies just as Bain Capital and many other do, shouldn't there be a larger support for the unfortunate who have ended up losing? Shouldn't the beneficiaries of this system feel some obligation to the government and economic system that has allowed them to amass such great wealth by paying a slightly higher tax rate and allowing for a larger safety net for the casualties of our Darwinian economic system? I certainly believe so, and I sense there will be a growing support for that idea in the near future as economic inequality continues to expand exponentially.

John Harwood, http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/25/10-questions-for-rick-perry/, The New York Times

Mike Dorning, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-02-03/romney-s-very-poor-at-highest-percentage-in-35-years-as-safety-gaps-grow.html, Bloomberg

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/gop/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ac/20120203/us_ac/10923526_mitt_romney_confirms_what_his_critics_assumed_all_along

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