Top Romney Adviser: If You Own A Microwave, You Aren’t Really Poor

 By Igor Volsky/Think Progress

A top adviser to Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign denied the nation’s income inequality gap in a Wall Street Journal editorial on Thursday, brushing off the growing concentration of wealth in the hands of the very wealthy by arguing that lower-income Americans are buying more consumer goods.
“Today we hear that the gains from economic growth accrue to the highest-income earners while the standard of living of the poor and middle America stagnates and the gap between the richest and the poorest grows ever wider,” Kevin Hassett and Aparna Mathur argue. “That portrait of the country is wrong“:

Yet the access of low-income Americans—those earning less than $20,000 in real 2009 dollars—to devices that are part of the “good life” has increased. The percentage of low-income households with a computer rose to 47.7% from 19.8% in 2001. The percentage of low-income homes with six or more rooms (excluding bathrooms) rose to 30% from 21.9% over the same period.
Appliances? The percentage of low-income homes with air-conditioning equipment rose to 83.5% from 65.8%, with dishwashers to 30.8% from 17.6%, with a washing machine to 62.4% from 57.2%, and with a clothes dryer to 56.5% from 44.9%.
The percentage of low-income households with microwave ovens grew to 92.4% from 74.9% between 2001 and 2009. Fully 75.5% of low-income Americans now have a cell phone, and over a quarter of those have access to the Internet through their phones.

But this argument, a favorite of conservative think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, is highly misleading. Appliances and commonly used consumer gadgets like cell phones are necessities in the 21st century and are significantly cheaper today than they were just decades earlier. In fact, were families to sell their appliances in order to help pay for food and other basic necessities, many would still struggle — for while prices on microwaves and air conditioners have fallen, “the real everyday basics such as quality child care and out-of-pocket medical costs” are “squeezing the budgets of the poor and middle-class alike.”
Hassett argues that safety net programs like “unemployment insurance, food stamps, Medicaid” help families afford basic needs, further shrinking the nation’s income gap. But these programs are already failing to keep up with need and Romney and Ryan have proposed massive cuts to the safety net in order to pay down the deficit and finance a tax cut plan that is heavily skewed towards the rich.
Their approach would only exacerbate the differences between the rich and poor — a gap that has grown dramatically since the late 1970s. Indeed, compared to the 34 countries in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the United States has a Gini coefficient — a number that measures the distribution of income on a scale of 0 (perfectly equal) to 1 (perfectly unequal) — of 0.47 and ranks near the very bottom in inequality. America also suffers from the absolute highest “percentage of national income that went to the top 1 percent” and “has seen income inequality increase at a much faster rate than most other countries.”
This trend is already devastating the American democratic ideals of equal opportunity and upward mobility. Unfortunately, neither Romney nor his advisers can see the problem or offer the kind of tax and economic policies that will help solve it.

Former McCain adviser: Republicans pushing party ‘far to the white’

By Ron Brynaert

It took many years for Senator John McCain to lose his unofficial RINO (conservative acronym for 'Republican In Name Only') status. And even though the Arizona senator has done his best to mollify conservatives that he backs a controversial new law which critics say will lead to racial profiling of Latinos, Republicans related to him in family and politics are taking the opposite point of view.

At Bloomberg News, Keven Hassett, an economist who "served as an economic adviser to the George W. Bush 2004 presidential campaign and as Senator John McCain's chief economic adviser during the 2000 presidential primaries," and "also served as a senior economic adviser to the McCain 2008 presidential campaign," writes, "If Democratic majorities survive the backlash against big government in this election cycle, it will be because Republicans, the party of the right, became the Party of White."

"A party that alienates racial minorities will justly be made a political minority, so the Republican response to what’s happening in Arizona will be a defining moment," Hassett adds.

While there are many policies that undercut the support of minorities for Republicans -- from opposition to affirmative action to regional support for the Confederate flag -- immigration is clearly the brewing Republican problem among Hispanic Americans. Republicans like Arizona Governor Jan Brewer have too often appeared hostile to immigrants.

Republicans need to be against illegal immigration, in favor of legal immigration -- and much more emphatic about the latter. Say what you will about the merits of Arizona’s new law: its timing was awful, politically, and its advocates have done a terrible job of distinguishing illegal immigration from immigration in general. Savvy Republicans would seek to reassure legal immigrants about their place in this country while exposing Democrats for advocating policies that make America’s welcome mat unsustainable.

Ronald Reagan said the U.S. was traditionally the land of opportunity, where “the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here.” Republicans need to rally around that view of America, fast. The November midterms are just around the corner.

"I do not want any discriminatory behavior, and I've talked to a group of lawmen," McCain told CBS' "The Early Show" last Tuesday. "They think they can implement this law without racial profiling."

But Hassett has at least one McCain in his corner: the Republican senator's daughter Meghan.

"Let me say up-front that I do not support the bill that was signed by Governor Jan Brewer," Meghan McCain wrote in her Daily Beast blog last Wednesday. "I believe it gives the state police a license to discriminate, and also, in many ways, violates the civil rights of Arizona residents."

Simply put, I think it is a bad law that is missing the bigger picture of what is really going on with illegal immigration. The concept that a law-enforcement official can stop an individual when “reasonable suspicion exists that a person is an alien, who is unlawfully present in the United States” is essentially a license to pull someone over for being Hispanic.

....

In the end, the saddest part for me is that we are all losing with this immigration law. Arizona is being shown in a negative light in the media, and once again Hispanic voters in Arizona have yet another reason to distrust the Republican Party. And the issue of immigration has now become so politicized that I seriously wonder if anything can be done to combat the real issues.