“The working poor haven’t abdicated responsibility for their lives. They’re drowning in it…”

The quotable Ezra Klein on Romney and the 47 percent:

Still, for my money, the worst of Romney’s comments were these: “My job is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”

When he said this, Romney didn’t just write off half the country behind closed doors. He also confirmed the worst suspicions about who he is: an entitled rich guy with no understanding of how people who aren’t rich actually live.

The thing about not having much money is you have to take much more responsibility for your life. You can’t pay people to watch your kids or clean your house or fix your meals. You can’t necessarily afford a car or a washing machine or a home in a good school district…. [Romney] is a guy who sold his dad’s stock to pay for college, who built an elevator to ensure easier access to his multiple cars, and who was able to support his wife’s decision to be a stay-at-home mom. That’s great! That’s the dream. The problem is that he doesn’t seem to realize how difficult it is to focus on college when you’re also working full time, how much planning it takes to reliably commute to work without a car, or the agonizing choices faced by families in which both parents work and a child falls ill. The working poor haven’t abdicated responsibility for their lives. They’re drowning in it….

Read the whole post, What Mitt Romney Doesn’t Get About Responsibility, at Bloomberg.

Via Brad DeLong.

Comments

[Janelle]

Ezra nailed it.

[El Jefe]

Yep. Been that poor. Twice. Once within the long end of the last five years. Romney wants to talk to me about responsibility, he can quaff a broken-glass milkshake first and then tell me which emergency room I could've gone to in order to get that sorted out, and how buying gas with the grocery money to get there would've boosted economic confidence indicators.

[lingin]

This piece and Paul Krugman's regarding the Republicans disdain for workers are pretty much anyone needs to know about the Romney/Ryan ticket and the current Republican party.