Political Faux Pas

Mitt Romney's comments about the very poor have gotten a lot of attention over the last week. One of my professors, who blogs over at Applied Rationality, wrote this in response to Romney's comments.

With respect to the Governor's 90-95 percent figure, he might be surprised (if he cared) to discover that 46.2 million Americans, 15.1 percent of our population, were officially poor in 2010. One third of Americans--more than 100 million people--lived in households with incomes below 200 percent of the poverty line and were considered poor or near poor.  6.7 percent of American were in deep poverty, meaning that they were living in households with incomes that were less than half of the poverty threshold. Those are sizable groups that Governor Romney is tagging as un-American and unworthy of his concern.

Well said.