Safety net comments display ignorance of growing social inequalities
Let's leave aside for now the fact that Romney and his party don't even really support the safety net; in fact, they have repeatedly threatened to dismantle large parts of it. And let's also not worry about the sheer political ineptness of Romney's statement. The candidate who pulls in around $60,000 a day without doing any work should probably try harder than he does to not appear out-of-touch and callous toward those whose votes he is trying to win. But the real issue here is that this is a candidate who views poverty, even extreme poverty, as unfortunate but inevitable.
The safety net that we have in place is vital. Things like Medicaid and food stamps are important, and — in theory if not always in practice — they help ensure that we live in a society where no one starves or dies from lack of medical attention. The safety net alleviates pain, but it only treats the symptoms, ignoring the disease. It's true that capitalism doesn't work without some inequality: There has to be a working class to toil for the capital-holding class. Supposing, for the sake of argument, that we do want capitalism to continue, doesn't that mean our current state of extreme inequality was unavoidable, and 15 percent of our people living in poverty is something we simply must accept?
No. After all, inequality in this country has been getting worse — much worse — just over the last 30 years, as the top percent of earners have made enormous income gains, all other income brackets have not. We had much lower inequality in the 1950s, and the poverty rate hit its all-time low in the 1960s. I don't think we were any kind of socialist utopia back then. Meanwhile, social mobility has declined: Far fewer people today manage to move up the income ladder. In fact, Europeans now have greater class mobility than Americans. These changes were not inevitable; they were a consequence of policy, and policy could reverse them.
But Romney doesn't think inequality should be talked about or acknowledged as a growing difficulty for many Americans. Poverty is not a real priority for men like him, finishing each year with exorbitant incomes; it's something that can supposedly take care of itself through a "safety net" that grows weaker with every passing election.
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