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Credit: Center for American Progress

One day after branding President Obama "really out of touch with what's happening in America," Mitt Romney marked his Florida primary victory by declaring, "I'm not concerned about the very poor." Of course, back in December Romney announced that "I'm concerned about the poor in this country," adding, "We have to make sure the safety net is strong and able to help those who can't help themselves."

If Mitt Romney's latest statement seems like a contradiction, at least it's a more honest one. After all, his proposal to slash $700 billion in Medicaid spending and send what's left as block grants to the states would devastate the program serving nearly 60 million poor and elderly Americans. But as it turns out, his 59 point, 162 page economic plan isn't very concerned with the middle class, either. Over the next decade, that budget-busting blueprint would drain $6.6 trillion from the U.S. Treasury and divert most of it into the pockets of the richest Americans.

On Wednesday, Romney explained his devil-may-care attitude towards the 46.2 million Americans now living in poverty and the 51 million more with incomes less than 50 percent above the poverty line:

"I'm not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there," Romney told CNN. "If it needs repair, I'll fix it. I'm not concerned about the very rich, they're doing just fine. I'm concerned about the very heart of America, the 90 percent, 95 percent of Americans who right now are struggling."

That's an odd statement for Mitt Romney to make, and not merely because he previously declared himself part of "the 80 to 90 percent of us" who are middle class. Romney's own economic plan says otherwise. Romney's isn't worried about fixing the safety net; he wants to shred it. And in December, Chris Wallace of Fox News called him on it.

WALLACE: But you don't think if you cut $700 billion dollars in aid to the states that some people are going to get hurt?

ROMNEY: In the same way that by cutting welfare spending dramatically, I don't think we hurt the poor. In the same way I think cutting Medicaid spending by having it go to the states run more efficiently with less fraud, I don't think will hurt the people that depend on that program for their healthcare.

It's not just that Romney's block grant program would lead governors to begin "capping enrollment, thinning benefits, increasing co-payments, and so on" in the future. As Ezra Klein explained, they are already doing that now:

Twenty states implemented benefit restrictions in the past year. In fiscal year 2010, 39 states implemented Medicaid provider rate cuts or freezes (up from 33 in fiscal year 2009), and 37 states have provider rate restrictions planned for the next fiscal year.

And as the Kaiser Family Foundation determined last year, the Ryan plan championed by Mitt Romney and virtually every Republican in Washington to repeal the Affordable Care Act would certainly hurt working Americans as well:

"By 2021, between 31 million and 44 million fewer people nationally would have Medicaid coverage under the House Budget Plan relative to expected enrollment under current law."

Then there's Mitt Romney's tax plan.

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Newt Gingrich won the South Carolina primary by playing the victim card. Now, Mitt Romney hopes to win the Republican nomination by doing the same thing. But while Gingrich's ploy of portraying himself as the latest conservative target of a liberal "elite" media assault is always a winner with the Republican faithful, Romney may not be so lucky with his gambit. After all, his uniquely toxic combination of immense wealth and near-total lack of empathy will make it hard for voters to believe Romney's claim that his foes are "attacking you."

Addressing his disappointed followers Saturday, Mitt Romney took a page out of the Linda Tripp/Christine O'Donnell playbook and announced, in essence, "I'm you." As Politico reported, Romney painted himself as everyman, the living incarnation of your American Dream (starting around the 4:40 mark above):

"Our president has divided the nation, engaged in class warfare and attacked the free enterprise system that has made America the economic envy of the world. We cannot defeat that president with a candidate who has joined in that very assault on free enterprise," Romney said.

Calling Gingrich's attacks on his Bain record "a mistake for our party and for our nation," Romney appealed to the hearts of Republican primary voters in his bid to win them back.

"When my opponents attack success and free enterprise, they're not only attacking me, they're attacking every person who dreams of a better future," Romney said. "He's attacking you."

Despite the best efforts of his water-carriers like David Brooks, Ari Fleischer and the Wall Street Journal editorial page, Romney's "I'm you" defense is going to be a very hard sell. After all, voters' obvious disdain for him has less to do with their mythical "envy" over his money and how he made it than their belief that Mitt Romney lives in a different world and simply doesn't care about theirs.

For confirmation, Mitt need only look to his ally and Massachusetts GOP Senator Scott Brown. Brown didn't merely call on Romney to release his tax returns (which he grudgingly announced he will do on Tuesday), but rejected any notion that the former Governor is like "you."

"He's in a category, a lot of those folks are in categories that we don't really understand."

Which is why Romney's repeated efforts to depict himself as a "man of the people" have failed so completely - and so comically. Romney, who this week explained that over the last decade "my income comes overwhelmingly from some investments made in the past," joked with jobless voters that "I'm also unemployed." The $250 million man similarly declared himself "part of the 80 to 90 percent of us" who are middle class, when just the "not very much" $374,000 he earned in speaking fees last year puts him in the top one percent of income earners. Whether or not he really enjoys firing people, Mitt Romney almost certainly was never in danger of either "getting a pink slip" or pooping in a bucket during his time as a missionary at a toney Paris mansion. (Who else would lecture a child about his plans to divvy up his estate among his 16 grandchildren or endorse rooftop canine waterboarding?) And there's no doubt that the man who spent $12 million to buy his third home (none of which are located on "the real streets of America") didn't win any friends when he offered this prescription for the housing market crisis:

"Don't try and stop the foreclosure process. Let it run its course and hit the bottom, allow investors to buy homes, put renters in them, fix the homes up and let it turn around and come back up."

It's no wonder Mitt Romney believes income inequality should only be discussed in "quiet rooms" and his tax returns not discussed at all.

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Some politicians are saying that the latest unemployment report is good news, but it's not. It shows us that this country is still in crisis. It shows us that the government needs to act quickly and aggressively to create jobs, and to restore the lost earning power of the average American who has a job.

Most of all it shows us that millions of struggling people are still invisible in the Nation's Capitol.

This week the Occupy movement is holding a series of "Take Back the Capitol" events in Washington. Let's hope it shines some light on the country's unemployed, under-employed, and under-earning millions. Until now, they've been pretty much invisible in that town.

The Invisible Americans are all around you. They're in your state, in your community, maybe in your family. Maybe they're your kids, just out of college. Maybe they're your fifty-something uncles and aunts, your grandparents, your grandchildren. They're right there in the jobs report, for anyone with the eyes - and the willingness - to find them.

Invisible: Millions of the long-term unemployed.

While some celebrated an unemployment rate of "only" 8.6 percent, half that change was explained by the fact that 315,000 people dropped out of the labor force. Job creation barely kept pace with the entry of new people into the workforce.

Those 315,000 people join the 5.7 million people officially classified as long-term unemployed. That number is at historically high levels, representing nearly half (43 percent) of all the jobless people in this country.

It's not that they don't want jobs. Most of them have fallen into despair. Even worse, what they may have fallen into is realism. Unless we use the power of government to do something, some of them will never work again. They're falling out of the "normal" economy and into a new reality of persistent joblessness and, for some, eventual poverty.

Invisible: Segregation on the unemployment line.

The official jobless rate for white people is 7.6 percent, versus 15.5 percent for African Americans and 11.4 percent for Hispanics.

And those are only the official numbers. The figures are much higher if you count the long-term unemployed, the under-employed, and "discouraged" workers.

In a nation that prides itself on being the land of opportunity, we're denying entire groups of people the chance for a better life.

Invisible: The jobless generation.

There's a silent epidemic of youth unemployment. Official teenaged unemployment is 23.7 percent, and the real rate is much higher. Recent college graduates face historically high jobless rates - along with historically high student debt.

Studies show that young people who begin their work lives un- or under-employed face an entire lifetime of lower income. By failing to act, we're betraying our own children and throwing away an entire generation of young people.

Invisible: The under-employed.

There's a silent epidemic of under-employment. There are 8.5 million people who want to work full-time but can only get part time work. in that category. That figure dropped slightly, but we don't know how much of the drop was due to people finding full-time work or being laid off altogether.

And remember, underemployed people aren't just making less money. In most cases they're also going without health insurance or other benefits. They're struggling on the margins of working America, barely surviving and never knowing how much money the'll earn from one week to the next.

Invisible: The vanishing public servant.

While Washington politicians drone on about "budget cuts," there's not much discussion of the fact that many of those cuts increase unemployment - at the Federal, state, and local levels. Government jobs have been dwindling since 2008, and the shrinkage is continuing a time when we need more of them.

Teachers, police officers, highway toll takers, postal workers - you name it, they're losing their jobs. And the only debate in Washington seems to be, How many more of them can we make unemployed?

Invisible: The drowning middle class.

Average hourly earnings for all nonfarm employees decreased last month by 1 percent. Average hourly earnings increased by only 1.8 percen over the last year, while the cost of living (measured by the Consumer Price Index) increased 3.5 percent.

Once again average Americans have fallen behind in earnings and has seen their standard of living decline. Meanwhile, incomes continue to skyrocket for the wealthiest Americans. Income inequality is the worst it's been since the Great Depression.

Welcome to the New Gilded Age.

Political Blindness

This week we heard almost nothing in Washington about direct action to address these crises. The Democrats' "payroll tax holiday" would provide urgently needed ongoing relief for the battered middle class, and would also have a mild job-creating effect. But it would do so in an inefficient way, and also needlessly and recklessly endangers Social Security.

Republicans have no solution at all - just more of the same policies that caused these problems in the first place.

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Memo to all of those people out there asking what the point of #OWS is: Have a look at these payroll statistics to get a clue if you don't have one yet. Via Reuters:

The median paycheck — half made more, half less — fell again in 2010, down 1.2 percent to $26,364. That works out to $507 a week, the lowest level, after adjusting for inflation, since 1999.

The number of Americans with any work fell again last year, down by more than a half million from 2009 to less than 150.4 million.

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There was, however, one group that did quite well. Quite well, indeed.

The number of workers making $1 million or more rose to almost 94,000 from 78,000 in 2009. However, that was still below some earlier years, including 2007, when more than 110,000 workers made more than $1 million each.

At the very top, the number of workers making more than $50 million rose in 2010 to 81, up from 72 the year before. But average pay in this group declined $4.5 million to $79.6 million.

Aw. Poor oligarchs took a little hit in pay but increased their ranks. Aren't they the lucky ones?

Meanwhile, we have Republicans in the Senate that are just worst than useless. At this point, I consider their inactions to be inactions of intentional evil.

Oh, here's a bonus. It's a long read, but worth it, if only to see how a teacher and a public employee in Ohio are coping. It's a story lots of us can tell -- just holding on by the edge of our fingernails, if that.

MotherJones: Ohio's War on the Middle Class

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I'm not seeing a lot of buzz about this, but there should be. The Congressional Progressive Caucus has unveiled their framework for jobs, which augments and expands upon the President's American Jobs Act.

The CPC's Rebuild The American Dream Framework has six parts to it. Specific policy proposals will be forthcoming, but here is the high level overview:

• Make it in America Again - focus on bolstering U.S. manufacturing
• Rebuild America - focus on infrastructure as a larger part of the jobs policy than the White House proposal
• Lead the Green Industrial Revolution - blending the first two elements into a focus on green industries and products
• Jobs for the Next Generation - Job training and education for young people
• Not Just Jobs – Good Jobs - Reinforcing Americans' right and access to collective bargaining, promoting jobs that provide wages, benefits and security that will preserve the middle class
• Fair Taxes – Shared Sacrifice - Pay for the program by taxing the wealthy in this country

At a time when poverty in this country has risen to one in six Americans, where joblessness among young people is at its highest level since the Great Depression, and jobs are the single biggest issue on the table, this framework is most welcome. It's the product of discussions caucus members had during the summer as they toured the country and spoke to people about what most concerned them.

While I haven't heard all of the specifics yet, I think there are some cues to be taken from progressives' budget proposal released earlier this year, which proposed a 45 percent tax rate on the wealthiest earners in this country, ending the wars, and preserving the social safety net for generations to come.

It's important to recognize that progressives are not trying to compete with the American Jobs Act, but instead have offered proposals which dovetail and augment his. I interpret that message as one of support not just for his plan, but for a larger vision of what can be done with the support of the American people.

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There was a pretty amazing moment Tuesday during the JPMorgan Chase shareholders meeting. A woman from the group Illinois People's Action, Dawn Dannenbring, who as a shareholder had the right to speak at the meeting, said to CEO Jamie Dimon: “As a person of faith, my God believes you shouldn’t take advantage of people when they are down. Do you believe in the same God I believe in?” Dimon was apparently a little taken aback, answering, "That's a hard one to answer.”

Well, I’m sure on one level it was. He wouldn’t have known what religion the woman was, or what she truly thought about God. He probably has never been asked his theological views in his job as JPMorgan Chase CEO before. But even though I have no knowledge whatsoever of Jamie Dimon’s faith or theology, I feel extremely confident in saying I know the answer: it would be “no.”

I don’t know what Dannenbring’s religion is, but it is clear she comes out of the historic faith tradition that takes the idea of a God caring about justice for regular people seriously. From the God of Genesis condemning Cain for not being his brother’s keeper, to Old Testament prophets who condemned their societies for throwing poor people out of their homes and leaving people to starve in the streets, to Jesus telling people to treat the weak and poor with mercy and help the least of these, the Judeo-Christian Bible shows us a God who cares deeply about economic justice and the downtrodden. And it isn’t just the Bible: pretty much every major religion, and every major ethical system ever developed, shares fundamental notions of fairness, compassion, honesty, treating others as you would want to be treated, and looking out for those weaker and poorer than you. These ideas are thousands of years old, and are the basis of a decent civilization.

Now I know some people in the financial industry who are fine people. Some of them understood the flaws in our financial system, and helped make constructive proposals on financial reform. Some of them invested the old-fashioned way, in great companies that are creating new jobs in America. But it seems apparent that most of the top executives and traders of the biggest financial institutions in America — the six Too Big To Fail banking conglomerates that own assets equivalent to 64 percent of our GDP — tend to get deeply confused by any question related to this kind of moral, ethical, or religious set of values because they don’t think about them in any way in their work lives.

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The Washington Post Sunday Outlook section had an article from the President of American Enterprise Institute, Arthur Brooks, making the conservative case for why wealthy people shouldn't be taxed very much, and why it was so nasty for President Obama to make arguments about fairness in his criticisms of the Ryan budget, which radically lowers taxes for the richest 10 percent of Americans while raising taxes on everyone else, ends the guarantee of health care and nursing home care for seniors and those with disabilities, forces the average senior citizen to pay more than $6,000 in out-of-pocket medical expenses, and cuts money for food stamps, health care for children, Pell Grants, and education funding by at least a third.

Brooks' argument boils down to the idea that if you are rich, it is probably because you earned the money by working harder and being smarter than most other people, and that this kind of merit doesn't deserve higher taxes; that in fact we should reward merit. He goes on to say the kind of redistribution us lefties support "for the sake of fairness, it weakens free enterprise, lowers opportunity and impoverishes us in many ways."

It is an interesting, if very familiar (conservatives in America have been making it for about 230 years), argument, and it is important to discuss because it goes to the heart of what conservatives in this country believe. Brooks does a good job of including some nuance in his argument, acknowledging for example that luck might have something to do with becoming wealthy, and that government had some modest role to play in a modern society, but essentially, he is very open about what conservatives believe: if you are wealthy, it is almost always because you deserve to be; if you are poor or working class, that is probably what you deserve as well.

I want to first make the case why the argument itself is wrong, and then move to a broader discussion of how this basic argument exposes how modern conservatism has gone so deeply off the rails.

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There is an old adage that always was a lot of comfort to those of us who barely survived our junior high school years: if you stand up to bullies, you’ll find they tend to be cowards not very far beneath the surface. Part of it is that they are so used to people cowering and giving way before them that when someone does stand up and fight back, they don't how to handle it.

We are seeing that play out right now in the world of politics. Big corporate interests and conservative Republicans are so used to bullying people into easy submission, that when someone stands up to them, they lose it awfully fast.

My first example is Republican reaction to the President's budget speech last week. Can you believe the level of high-pitched whining coming from Republicans when the President pointed out the fairly obvious fact that their budget is a tad bit unfair because it takes health care and nursing home coverage from seniors and those with disabilities while giving massive new tax cuts to millionaires? Seems obvious to me, but when Obama stood his ground and made these self-evident points, these guys squealed like stuck pigs. "Partisan,” "class warfare,” and all that. Ryan even complained that Obama invited him to the speech but then criticized his plan, which sounded a lot to me like Newt being invited onto Air Force and then complaining about his seating assignment. Now, as Jon Stewart hilariously pointed out, this is coming from a party whose leaders have spent the last three years calling Obama a socialist, communist, Nazi, and a friend of terrorists, questioning his citizenship and his religion and his patriotism. Great on the old dishing it out thing, not so much on the taking it thing.

Here's another example: Wall Street bankers fretting about the "moral hazard" of homeowners having their mortgages written down or about the fact that other businesspeople are tired of having the big banks make tens of billions of profit off of swipe fees while refusing to negotiate on the issue. The big Wall Street banks have been so used to having their way all the time, unfortunately with either party in power, that when anyone challenges their right to do whatever they want, they get very hurt. They were appalled when Obama and other Democrats said the mildest things in reproach while working to pass last year’s financial reform bill. One Wall Street billionaire, chairman of Blackstone Stephen Schwarzman, even compared Obama to Hitler, saying about a modest proposal to close a big loophole for wealthy bankers, it’s a "war... like when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939." Schwarzman and other top bankers are said to be furious about the fact that Obama occasionally suggest modest new regulations and taxes on the elite circle of financial wizards who created a the biggest financial bubble in history, wreaked trillions of dollars of destruction on the economy (both ours and the world’s), got saved by our government and the taxpayers, and got to keep not only cushy jobs but their nifty bonuses anyway.

Now they are appalled that Elizabeth Warren might want to force them to not have misleading fine print in their consumer financial documents. They are outraged at the idea that Dick Durbin and retail businesses might want some oversight that would keep them from charging whatever swipe fees they want to charge. They are deeply disturbed at the moral hazard of underwater homeowners getting their mortgages written down a little. They take umbrage at the idea that a senior citizen taking in $14,000 a year in Social Security isn’t willing to sacrifice by letting their benefits be cut, or to have to pay $6,000 more a year in out-of-pocket Medicare costs. If we don’t stop outraging these poor Wall Street bankers so much, they might have to get treated for hypertension.

When they aren’t comparing Obama to Hitler, or complaining to their friends at very expensive dinner parties, they are spending lots and lots of money. Campaign contributions, lobbying expenses, advertising, money to the Chamber of Commerce and Karl Rove front groups that is harder to trace because there is no reporting requirements. And a lot of this money will go back to Republicans so they can do PR campaigns attacking Obama as being too “partisan,” or engaging in “class warfare.”

By the way, speaking of front groups, here’s the other thing the Republicans and Wall Street are colluding on: using Moody’s and Standard and Poor’s rating services to support their agenda. I wrote last week about Moody’s changing the rating on Wisconsin to help Scott Walker’s jihad against unions. Now Standard and Poor’s are issuing vague threats — engineered to get headlines — about lowering the federal government credit rating if we don’t do “something” about the deficit sometime soon. The problem, as I wrote last week, is that having the two companies at the heart of the financial fraud, the two companies who rated everything their client banks asked them to as AAA bonds regardless of how weak they were, be the arbiter on good fiscal policy is like having a convicted murderer be a character witness at your trial. This is politics pure and simple, with Moody’s and Standard and Poor’s continuing to serve their main clients’ agendas no matter how much fraud is involved.

Congressional Republicans and the big banks are classic bullies, used to getting their way on all issues all of the time. When you stand up to them and ask for something as foreign to them as fairness and decency, they lose it and lash out in return. Obama, and Democrats, and progressives in general need to keep them from getting away with it.

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I’m going to comment on the President’s budget speech in a minute, but first I want to highlight something happening on Capitol Hill today that really ties together the Republican governing philosophy.

There is a certain rich irony in Darrell Issa bringing Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker to the Capitol for a hearing on how Moody’s has boosted Wisconsin’s credit rating because of the union busting measures Walker has been pushing in the state. So in one sentence, you have a leader of the House Republicans that are trying to do away with Medicare and Medicaid, the governor who most personifies the attempt to crush collective bargaining in this country, and one of the principal companies at the dead center of the fraud on Wall Street that brought down the world economy. They should take their show on the road. You could entitle it “Cruelty, Arrogance, and Fraud: How to Dismantle the American Middle Class in Three Easy Steps.”

Issa, Walker, and Moody’s belong together. This is all one story — the story of a relentless assault on the working middle class and those desperately trying to gain a foothold on the ladder up to it.

Now there is nothing the least bit notable about two right-wing Republican politicians hanging out together — that happens at every exclusive country club in America. But touting the new ratings upgrade Moody’s just gave to NYC is like having a guy just convicted of murder as your character witness in the case over in the next courtroom; he might say nice things about you, but he doesn’t bring much credibility to the table. Moody’s is one of the least credible companies in America right now, condemned yesterday in a Congressional report for their pivotal role in the financial crisis. Their collusion with the biggest Wall Street firms in issuing thousands of AAA-bond ratings to sub-prime derivatives that were basically junk was, as much as any other factor, at the heart of the fraudulent bubble that caused the financial collapse of 2007 — a collapse that caused the loss of trillions of dollars of wealth to pension funds, foundation and church endowments, and individual stockholders. Remember, AAA-rated stocks are supposed to be the safest of the safe, as safe as sticking your money into a savings account in an FDIC-insured bank. Pension funds, church and foundation trustees, state and county treasurers are all looking for investments that are absolutely safe, completely reliable, and they depend on Moody’s to tell them what those investments are. They are fine with accepting a lower rate of return because they want their investments to be safe. But the culture or reliability and integrity and honest numbers crunching at Moody’s eroded badly in the late ’90s and early 2000s, and with the pressure of the big Wall Street banks pushing them to do it or lose business, they started ginning up the ratings of these junk bonds to assure getting more business from the big boys. As much as any other single thing, this line of corruption going from the big banks to Moody’s and the other bond ratings companies set the financial industry, the housing market, and all of us up for the big fall.

Now this same company is playing political footsie with politicians like Scott Walker and Darrell Issa. It’s financial fraud and political fraud all wrapped up in a nice little package. There is nothing about what Scott Walker is doing — giving huge tax cuts to big business while crushing unions and cancelling infrastructure projects — that will help make Wisconsin’s finances or economy stronger in the long run. If you destroy middle-class jobs, drive down working families’ pay, and give more tax breaks to your big business friends, all you end up with is a third-world economy. There is nothing about what House Republicans are doing that will give our federal budget more stability, because if you give $4.2 trillion in tax cuts to millionaires and big business while taking away Medicare, Medicaid, and all the other programs that help support working middle-class families, you will have neither a balanced budget (the House Republican budget won’t come until balance until 2040, and that’s only if we have 2.8 percent unemployment, so it will never come into balance), nor a strong economy.

Which brings me to the president’s speech yesterday. Like I said, this is all one story.

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The Ryan budget is a remarkable document: all of its budget cuts hammer working class families, seniors, and students — while all of its tax cuts go straight to millionaires. It does almost nothing to deal with the deficit, yet still manages to deal a death blow to virtually every member of the working middle class and everyone trying to work their way into it. It is especially hard on seniors and the most vulnerable in society in the midst of the toughest economic times since the Great Depression, doing serious economic damage to anyone who isn’t a millionaire, oil company, or Wall Street bank. The good news, for those who are millionaires? They get so many economic benefits it will be hard to keep track of them all.

Let’s start with the deficit itself. According to a new Center on Budget and Policy Priorities report, the actual deficit reduction in the Ryan plan would be only an average of $15 billion a year over the next 10 years. If we end up at a consistent 2.8 percent unemployment rate in spite of all the economic devastation this budget would bring to the middle class (which would be the lowest unemployment since the peak years of the 1950s), get out of the wars we are in pretty quickly, start no new wars or humanitarian “police actions,” have the kind of income growth we haven’t seen since the 1960s, and have no big terrorist attacks or natural disasters we have to deal with, the Ryan budget theoretically gets us to a balanced budget by about 2040.

Great. I can get to a balanced budget a lot faster than that, and do it without dismantling Medicare and Medicaid, and without taking an axe to Pell Grants, Head Start, and meals for shut-in seniors and hungry children. Heck, Jan Schakowsky’s plan balances the entire budget except for interest payments on the national debt in five years. You can easily balance the budget in less than 10 years, even including those interest payments, simply by cutting the waste in military spending, reforming the government contracting procedures, ending tax loopholes for investment bankers and offshore companies, ending subsidies to oil companies and big agribusinesses, taxing speculative financial trades, and having millionaires pay taxes at the same rate they did under Ronald Reagan.

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