Mitt Romney demonstrated his utter inability to comprehend the basic number ordering system last week.
He said, specifically, that he’s “not concerned about the very poor“, and instead wants to focus on the middle-class, the “very heart of the America, the 90 percent, 95 percent of Americans who right now are struggling.”
His rationale is that the very poor have a “safety net” in place, and so we can basically stop thinking about them. Whereas the middle-class, that block in the middle who it’s assumed aren’t really poor but are doing kinda-okay-but-could-be-better – the ones who might actually vote for Romney – well now, they’re worth some pandering.
The point being, of course, that those people are by definition better off than the “very poor” who need those safety nets, and it makes no coherent sense to be more concerned about them.
He also said:
The area that I think is the greatest challenge that the country faces right now is not to focus our effort on how we help the poor, as much as to focus our effort on how to help the middle class in America, and get more people in the middle class, and get people out of being poor and becoming middle income.
A sentence in which he both continues to misunderstand how numbers work and contradicts himself a couple of times.
Oh, and if you look at the actual tax plan Romney’s proposed, most of the middle-class he’s courting get screwed over pretty good anyway. And Obama’s not exactly unfamiliar with similar rhetoric himself.
So, good luck America. Hope that democracy thing works out for ya.
