Ask and you shall receive (courtesy of the Kaiser Family Foundation).

Romney in January:

Asked about his economic plan, Romney said repeatedly that he was not concerned with very poor Americans, but was focused instead on helping the middle class. Romney explained that he was confident that food stamps, housing vouchers, Medicaid and other assistance would keep the poor afloat — he pledged to fix holes in that safety net ‘if it needs repair.’

Here is Romney saying the same about not worrying about the poor in October (h/t Andrew Sullivan from Business Insider’s Michael Brendan Dougherty). I guess not that many folks were paying that much attention then. But Romney has continued to expose himself as someone who doesn’t have a regard for addressing issues that affect the poor.

How does he reconcile not worrying about the poor with his religious beliefs?

He can’t.

The basic contradiction of Romney being a Mormon and saying this is that it is a severely un-Christian statement. The standard Christian position on the poor is that you must regard the poor and that heaven doesn’t favor human beings for their worldly wealth. In Bible verses Mark 10:21 – 24, Jesus counsels a wealthy man who leads a good life and wants to know how he can get to heaven:

²¹ Jesus looked at him and loved him. “One thing you lack,” he said. “Go, sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.”

²² At this the man’s face fell. He went away sad, because he had great wealth.

²³ Jesus looked around and said to his disciples, “How hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of God!”

²⁴ The disciples were amazed at his words. But Jesus said again, “Children, how hard it is^{[e] [sometimes: “is for those who trust in riches”]} to enter the kingdom of God!

²⁵ It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”

I don’t know about what the Angel Moroni tells Romney and his fellow Mormon’s, but I will leave that to the evangelical voter to reconcile.

What about the working poor?

For more secular issue voters like me, it is the thoughts of a rich man who has consistently shown that he doesn’t value hard work, he values hard currency.

He is the face and feeling of trickle down. It’s not “inartful” it’s not a “gaffe”, it’s his ideology. The Working Poor is a real thing. Almost 10% of Americans are Working Poor. They exist, They are real, and they matter. Their work should be respected by the people that govern them. Romney is simply promising to be a President that doesn’t enact policies for the poor and the working poor will be profoundly neglected by a Romney administration.

Thinking about every time you may have been out to eat. That goes from Applebee’s to Capital Grille..there are dishwashers in that kitchen and bus boys cleaning your table and bar backs hauling around our garbage. Here is the median salary of a full time dishwasher/food prep:

We do not have salary data for this specific career but we can provide average wages for all careers in the category of Combined Food Preparation and Serving Workers, Including Fast Food MEDIAN ANNUAL WAGE: $18,610
MEDIAN HOURLY WAGE: $8.95*

TOTAL EMPLOYEED NATIONALLY: 2,692,170

What’s Romney’s plan for these Dishwashers? A slate of service cuts and tax credit reductions. Less is more for the least of those.

Romney’s tax policy, described simply, is to extend the Bush tax cuts and, then on top of that, sharply cut taxes on corporations, the wealthy, and upper-middle class investors, while letting a set of tax breaks that help the poor expire.

Let them eat gratuity!

verb: To support oneself or one’s endeavors using one’s father’s bank account.

Former Republican Presidential Candidate Jon Huntsman bootstrapped his way through a Quixotic campaign.

John King. Never been a fan, and his debate moderation left a lot to be desired. The way King approached Marianne Gingrich’s interview with ABC discussing Gingrich’s infidelities showed what’s wrong with our media. King opens the debate by basically turning to Gingrich and saying: tell me all about your marital troubles. Watch the video below

King knew he was marginalized as a referee of the proceedings after that moment. I don’t know if King knows why. King basically asks Gingrich if he wants to comment on a wreck that was a previous marriage. He doesn’t even bother to challenge Newt in the context of his views on marriage equality or his crusade against Bill Clinton. He just basically asks him if he wants to share some anecdotes regarding his 2nd marriage/divorce.

A divorce that I or any other voter could give two shits about. He could have discussed: The recession. The Iraq war. The mortgage crisis. Fannie/Freddie. The national budget. Reproductive rights. Global warming. No. He wants to know what Gingrich has to say about his 2nd ex wife.

When Gingrich dings him, King then tries to beg Gingrich off with the punk move of saying “this story did not come from our network”. It came from your network the minute you brought up at the Republican debate. If you can’t stand for the value of the question when challenged you shouldn’t ask it.

Really? After the week you’ve had Romney? This is the best that you could come up with? thumbs. down.

He also said he didn’t “inherit money from my parents”.

Romney’s quote on firing people has created a debate liberal/progressive circles: is it fair to attack Romney saying he “likes firing people”. I think it is fair to ding Romney for this quote the given context.

Here it is in context:

“I like being able to fire people who provide services to me,” Romney said to an audience in Nashua, New Hampshire. “You know, if someone doesn’t give me a good service that I need, I want to say I’m going to go get someone else to provide that service to me.”

and the video:

Who likes getting rid of their people? Or even thinking about it?

If it’s personal or medical services for you or your family, people like to find someone and use them. Dry cleaners, tailers, cobblers, grocers, babysitters, schools, doctors. If you pay people do services for you, quite often they become people that get christmas cards and bonuses from you, and can become quite close to the family. You just want to pick the right person. You don’t want to have to think about firing them. Ever.

A lot of folks heard this and point out that firing people generally sucks. It sucks for a lot of employers, supervisors and managers because you have to be the bad guy and/or you may be laying off a perfectly good worker. The emotional toll in mass layoffs can be stressful for all involved. In addition to that, a manager shouldn’t really like to fire someone. Employee turnover, recruitment and training is expensive. Firing employees either in discrete situations or in mass layoffs is not all peaches for those who operate a company. It says you may have hired wrong: too many too soon? Too many in the wrong role? Too many resources on a bad product? Stress increases while pay stagnates for workers you do keep. It can ruin the morale of a company. It can mean you didn’t hire well enough, or train well enough, or screen well enough or pay well enough last time. Employee turnover is not a good thing for a company’s operations. If you are someone running a company that creates jobs, you want to avoid losing employees as much as possible. “Like” and “firing” is not something a lot of folks outside of the “Devil Wears Prada” would say.

Romney wanted to let 2 of the 3 auto makers go bankrupt and wanted to let the whole foreclosure thing play out

The TARP bailout funds the George W. Bush administration approved for automakers in 2008 GM and Chrysler and the Obama administration approved for auto suppliers in 2009 continue to be attacked by Mitt Romney. Romney argued that those funds, used as operating capital by loans from TARP to survive long enough to go through managed bankruptcy and restructuring. That plan, which has put these companies back on the right track was designed and administered by the Obama AdministraGM, Chrysler and GMAC, shouldn’t have been provided and the auto makers should have been forced into managed bankruptcy immediately. This doesn’t seem to make sense. The automakers and suppliers needed the bridge tion. Last June, Romney is quoted in Politico as saying:

“The bailout program was not a success because the bailout program wasted a lot of money,” Romney said in the debate, arguing that the right thing to do was “letting these enterprises go through bankruptcy” with no public support.

Basically, Romney is arguing that more layoffs were in order and possibly the shutdown of Chrysler, GM which would have shuttered their suppliers. GM and Chrysler could not find any private investors prior to restructure. The government was the investor of last resort. Steve Rattner the “auto czar” for the Obama Administration, quantifies the job loss prior to the bailouts for Tom Walsh of the Detroit Free Press:

In sum, Rattner remains a fierce defender of the auto bailouts — as the alternative to liquidation — and he’s proud of the post-bankruptcy profits of GM and Chrysler. Yet he frets that they employ far fewer U.S. workers. The 113,000 jobs the U.S. auto industry added since mid-2009 is only one-third of the 334,000 lost in the year preceding the bailouts.

Emphasis on the part about liquidation is mine. Basically the Romney “private bankruptcy only” prescription for GM and Chrysler would probably have cost in the order of a million+ of jobs in the midst of the worst economy since the great depression vs. thousands lost under the TARP bailout and Obama administration’s managed bankruptcy plan (334K – 113K). Romney desire to allow financial ruin to run it’s course is hardly isolated to corporate bankruptcy.

“Don’t try and stop the foreclosure process. Let it run its course and hit the bottom.”October 17, 2011

That’s the first thing with Mitt’s statement: it betrays the sentiment that he believes that widespread financial ruin is something that makes sense. Advocating for foreclosures to run their course in this deep recession and for two US automakers to be left in the lurch basically is arguing for longer unemployment lines, abandoned communities and a deeper economic despair.

He created Shareholder Value, not Jobs

Romney didn’t “operate” companies that were bought out by Bain. What Romney did at Bain was good for shareholders. It is good for the folks in corner offices who need to lower cost so that they hit their revenue goals and get their bonuses. Creating wealth for those few by restructuring an existing company is not creating jobs, it’s extracting value. That’s what Romney was good at Bain: extracting capital for his investors. Bain was not brought in to grow a company, it was brought in to grow shareholder value. Bain is brought in when the owners feel that their employees aren’t delivering enough profit to them by doing their jobs. So they bring in Bain Capital to make it so by identifying people who aren’t giving them the “good service that they need”. Bain says so and is honest about it (from: Ezra Klein in the Washington Post):

[…]the Bain prospectus says “The objective of the fund is to achieve an annual rate of return on invested capital in excess of the returns generated by conventional investments in the public equity market and the private equity market.” It never mentions “jobs,” “job,” or “employees.” Those simply aren’t the objective. Sometimes, in fact, they’re collateral damage.

He got rid of those folks and got shareholders what they were looking for: money. He was a good consultant for them, but in no means was he ever tasked or proficient at creating jobs.