These days it seems like everyone is talking about the latest book-to-movie sensation, The Hunger Games. Set in a dystopian future America, two teenagers are selected from each of the poor 12 districts surrounding a wealthy city known as the Capitol to fight to the death on reality television. One of the highest-grossing movies of 2012, millions have flocked to theaters and bookstores to see the movie and purchase the book.

In The Hunger Games, the wealthy people of the Capitol leverage their power to create a game only they can win. Unfortunately, this is a storyline similar to one that many Americans know all too well. Lionsgate, the studio behind The Hunger Games, seemed to recognize that—they partnered with a number of anti-hunger charities as part of the movie’s rollout, though they cracked down on other advocates who were riffing off the franchise’s themes.

And while The Hunger Games may have surrendered its place atop the box office to The Avengers, the fight against hunger remains a real and pressing issue in Washington. Time and time again, conservatives in our nation’s capital choose to preserve the “invisible benefits”— the tax breaks, loopholes, and subsidies that benefit the wealthy—at the expense of programs that create jobs and help low-income families feed their children and boost our economy.

This week the House of Representatives is expected to vote on a package that would cut more than a shocking $33 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Cuts of this magnitude will impact every household seeking nutrition assistance, the overwhelming majority of which have a member who is elderly, disabled, a child, or working poor. Two million people would lose all of their benefits, and 44 million others would see their benefits reduced; 280,000 schoolchildren would lose automatic access to their free school breakfasts and lunches.
The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program has helped millions of Americans such as Tara, a working mother who once went hungry for a whole weekend to feed her son, put food on the table. Without it more than 5 million Americans would have slipped into poverty in 2010.

It’s time to tell conservatives in Congress that we’re done playing these hunger games. We don’t need to cut food assistance for families struggling against hunger in order to finance more tax breaks for millionaires and to bolster our bloated military budget.

If Congress is hoping that you don’t know about these cuts or that you won’t contact their offices to push back, they’re going to be wrong. Help us spread the word about these cuts—share our Hunger Games trailer and weigh in with your members of Congress now.

Nearly 45 million Americans are counting on you. May the odds be ever in your favor!

Melissa Boteach is the Director of the Half in Ten Campaign and Katie Wright is a Research Associate with the Half in Ten campaign at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

As ThinkProgress noted Tuesday, Ryan’s budget seems to ignore Catholic social teaching that calls for protecting the poor and improving access to food, jobs, health care, housing, and the social safety net. And now religious leaders are making the same case. The founder of the PICO National Network, the largest national coalition of religious congregations, slammed Ryan’s claim of adherence to Catholic teaching as “the height of hypocrisy” in a release circulated Wednesday:

“It’s the height of hypocrisy for Rep. Ryan to claim that his approach to the budget is shaped by Catholic teaching and values,” said Fr. John Baumann, S.J., founder of PICO National Network. [...] “A central moral measure of any budget proposal is how it affects “the least of these” (Matthew 25). The needs of those who are hungry and homeless, without work or in poverty should come first.”

“By these measures,” the release says, “the Ryan budget is a severe failure,” noting that it cuts Medicare, Medicaid, Pell Grants, food stamps, and “other programs that help vulnerable working families make it through tough times and live better lives,” while giving massive tax breaks to the wealthiest Americans and corporations. Overall, 62 percent of Ryan’s budget cuts come from programs that benefit the poor. “The mission of the Church is to ‘bring good news to the poor’ and to protect the vulnerable, not to justify the impoverishment of the very young, the very old and the sick in order to enrich the wealthy,” the release says.

This isn’t the first time religious leaders have criticized the House GOP budget. When Ryan released the budget in March, Bishop Gene Robinson called it an “immoral disaster” that “robs the poor,” and Father Thomas Kelly, a constituent of Ryan’s, said he was “outraged” that Ryan defended the budget “on moral grounds.” Last year’s Ryan budget faced similar criticism, as religious leaders blasted it for adhering more closely to the policies of anti-religion, anti-government author Ayn Rand than to the teachings of the Bible.

That echoed the backlash Ryan received last year, but it hasn’t stopped him from attempting to use Catholic social teaching to support his budget. “A person’s faith is central to how they conduct themselves in public and in private,” Ryan told the Christian Broadcast Network, before saying the Catholic principles of subsidiarity and the preferential option for the poor guided his plan:

Those principles are very very important, and the preferential option for the poor, which is one of the primary tenants of Catholic social teaching, means don’t keep people poor, don’t make people dependent on government so that they stay stuck at their station in life, help people get out of poverty out onto life of independence.

Watch it, courtesy of the Christian Broadcast Network:

Though Timothy Dolan, the president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, gave some mild praise to Ryan’s “attention to the poor” in 2011, the budget seems to contradict the Catholic Church’s voting guide and standards on how to address domestic poverty. In “Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship,” a voting guide produced by the USCCB, the Church outlines a specific message on welfare policy, saying it “should reduce poverty and dependency, strengthen family life, and help families leave poverty through work, training, and assistance with child care, health care, housing, and transportation. It should also provide a safety net for those who cannot work.” Later, it defines an even more specific approach to food assistance and nutrition policy:

A first priority for agriculture policy should be food security for all. Because no one should face hunger in a land of plenty, Food Stamps, the Special Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), and other nutrition programs need to be strong and effective.

Ryan’s budget, however, does just the opposite. More than 60 percent of its cuts come from programs that help the poor. It would kick millions out of SNAP, (the federal food stamp program) and would gut the Women, Infant, and Children nutrition program. Food stamps lifted millions of women and children out of poverty in 2009, while tax credits and other programs benefiting low-income families (which could be cut by Ryan’s plan to end such credits) kept millions of women and children out of poverty. And it guts Medicare, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act, ignoring the Church’s teachings on health care.

Ryan’s belief that those programs create dependency on the government have also been proven false. Far from creating dependency, social welfare programs are shrinking as the economy continues its recovery.

Meanwhile, Ryan’s belief in subsidiarity — the idea that programs for the poor should be handled by local actors — denies reality when it comes to social welfare programs. State and local governments don’t have the capacity to manage welfare programs like Medicare, Medicaid, SNAP, and WIC, all of which address areas the Church says should be protected. Neither do local charities or churches. During the Great Recession, as the number of impoverished Americans ballooned, donations fell and churches and local charities were often stretched beyond their means, left unable to help many of the most vulnerable members of their communities.

Ryan’s budget ignores that the Catholic Church’s teachings regarding the poor often align closely with those of progressives. Pope Benedict XVI, in fact, has called for greater governmental attention to the poor and redistribution of wealth to address rising income inequality. Ryan’s views, however, adhere more closely to author Ayn Rand, who denounced religion, opposed governmental aid to the poor and middle class, and, despite his supposed adherence to Catholic social teaching, was Ryan’s inspiration to enter politics.

The number of working Americans earning so little they lived in poverty reached 7.2 percent of the labor force in 2010, the highest level in at least two decades, the government said on Friday.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics counted 7.6 percent of women among the working poor, compared to 6.7 percent of men. In 2009, the working poor rate was 7 percent.

The number of workers in poverty would be even higher were it not for government safety net programs that have reduced poverty rates during the recession. Food stamps, for instance, have lifted millions of working families out of poverty, reducing the poverty rate by 8 percent in 2009. Tax credits that help low-income families, like the Earned Income and Child tax credits, kept nearly 5 million women and children out of poverty in 2010. Other policies, like scheduled minimum wage increases at the state level, will benefit 1.4 million workers in 2012, and several states are considering boosting the minimum wage this year.

Republicans, meanwhile, have targeted many of those programs for budget cuts. The House GOP budget cuts millions off of the federal food stamp program and could, theoretically, end the working family tax credits to pay for tax cuts for the richest Americans. The GOP has also opposed minimum wage increases, even though the current federal minimum would need to be raised by more than $2 an hour to match its 1968 buying power.

According to a new study from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, food stamps substantially reduced the poverty rate in 2009, the last year data is available, the New York Times reports:

The food stamp program…reduced the poverty rate by nearly 8 percent in 2009, the most recent year included in the study, a significant impact for a social program whose effects often go unnoticed by policy makers. [...]

The study, which examined nine years of data, tried to measure the program’s effects on people whose incomes remained below the poverty threshold. The program lifted the average poor person’s income up about six percent closer to the line over the length of the study, making poverty less severe. When the benefits were included in the income of families with children, the result was that children below the threshold moved about 11 percent closer to the line.

The USDA study aligns closely with a similar one released by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, which found that food stamps reduced the number of Americans living in extreme poverty in 2011 from 1.46 million to just over 800,000. SNAP’s effects on children are even bigger — the program cut the number living in extreme poverty by half, according to CBPP.

Republicans, however, have made no secret of their wish to gut the program. The House GOP budget would either cut millions of Americans off of food assistance or would substantially reduce the already-modest amount each family receives. The program, Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) continues to argue, is unsustainable. In reality, the growth in SNAP was due almost entirely to the effects of the Great Recession. Its enrollment has dropped as the economy has improved, and it is scheduled to continue shrinking over the next 10 years.

Many working families are now being led by single mothers or women who are primary breadwinners, and according to an analysis from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, two primary tax credits are responsible for keeping millions of women and girls out of poverty each year. The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), which benefits low-income workers, kept an estimated 3.4 million women above the poverty line in 2010. Add in the Child Tax Credit (CTC), and the number of women who avoided poverty swells to nearly 5 million, CBPP found:

The numbers rise when you include a second federal income tax credit — the less well-known CTC, which provides up to $1,000 per child for working families: together, the CTC and EITC kept 4.9 million women and girls above the poverty line in 2010, including more than 800,000 just by the Recovery Act’s expansions of both credits.

As CBPP’s Arloc Sherman noted, research shows that the EITC continues to help women even after they retire. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the EITC helps boost Social Security retirement benefits for women, since those benefits are based on prior income history.

Unfortunately, the newly-adopted House GOP budget could end many tax breaks in order to finance a massive tax cut for the rich, though Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) refuses to say which breaks would be eliminated. If the GOP and Ryan continue their history of targeting programs that benefit the poor to pay for tax breaks for the rich, however, beneficial tax credits like the EITC and CTC could be at risk.

Lionsgate, which is set for a record-breaking opening weekend with its movie adaptation of the dystopian young adult novel The Hunger Games, has reconsidered the takedown notice the company sent to imagine Better, an organization running an anti-hunger campaign inspired by the franchise.

The takedown notice, exclusively reported by ThinkProgress yesterday, targeted the Hunger Is Not A Game campaign, which is building support for Oxfam’s GROW program aimed at making food aid more efficient and less wasteful. The entertainment company accused Imagine Better of “causing damage to Lionsgate and our marketing efforts” — even though Lionsgate had previously wished Imagine Better luck while declining to sign on as a formal partner.

But now Lionsgate has reconsidered in the wake of widespread fan outrage. The company will not pursue legal action to back up the takedown notice. And Kate Piliero, the vice president for corporate communications for Lionsgate’s film division, emailed me to say that the company’s main concern was that their official charitable partners for the film have exclusive use of the film’s official images and logo (Imagine Better had created its own, separate set of images and branding).

“Lionsgate’s partnership with the United Nations’ World Food Programme as well as Feeding America, both tied to the release of The Hunger Games, is helping to generate awareness of and funds for this global issue,” she wrote. “We absolutely support and encourage the efforts of organizations battling world hunger and would encourage fans to join our efforts by visiting www.hungergames.com.”

In America, if not in Panem, it seems, fans and corporations can co-exist without a legal fight to the death.

Like many of our most popular cultural artifacts, The Hunger Game is a Leatherman of a series, a multi-purpose tool for discussing everything from war and insurgency (as always, read Amy Davidson) to an increasingly brutal college admissions process. But on the occasion of the movie adaptation’s arrival in theaters, it’s worth returning to the franchise’s title: this is a story about a country in which the unimaginably rich manipulate the desperately poor with incredible cruelty, and where a fossilized class system treats people who want to survive it, much less rise from one class into the next, with violence and sadism. The Hunger Games begins in a world where roses are imaginable, and bread is a commodity so valuable that its arrival is a symbol from the heavens and it can create emotional ties that last a lifetime. The Hunger Games is also about war, and democracy, and torture, and personal autonomy, but all of those consequences and conversations are offshoots of a basic setup: a world where a few people have anything and many people have almost nothing.

A movie about savage inequalities is almost absurdly timely, even if we don’t live in a world where the citizens of subject states each much send two children between 12 and 18 to fight to the death in a televised competition for the amusement of the vastly wealthy, and the temporary economic elevation of a lucky survivor and his or her family. And The Hunger Games is at its best when it puts the rich and their victims in contact, though it falters when it comes to portraying the competition between those who are desperately hoping to rise.

Some of the most biting work in The Hunger Games comes from the adult actors, and from a series of scenes that illustrate how excess can be as anaesthetizing as it is rewarding. “You two are in for a treat,” trills Effie Trinket (Elizabeth Banks), the noxious MC of the District 12 Reaping, after Katniss and Peeta have been separated from their families and boarded the luxury train that is sweeping them off to their likely deaths. “Crystal chandeliers! Platinum doorknobs!” It’s more likely that the young people in her over-manicured care will appreciate regular access to food than the post-apocalyptic equivalent of the Restoration Hardware catalogue. But Effie can’t possibly acknowledge the immiseration that creates her elaborate outfits, powers the bullet train on which she travels, and covers the tables at which her charges can eat only once they’re marked for slaughter.

Later in the movie, Haymitch (Woody Harrelson), Katniss and Peeta’s drunken but not un-savvy mentor, blanches watching a Capitol family gives their children play toys for a battle they’ll never have to fight. For them, the Hunger Games are another opportunity to consume, to place bets and to host elaborate parties, rather than evidence of their own investment in injustice. The pageantry leading up to the Games distances the viewers from what they’re actually watching. The public coffers supply Katniss and Peeta with a sumptuously-furnished apartment, designer training tracksuits, gorgeous outfits to wear to pre- and post-competition interviews with the fantastically unctuous Ceaser Flickerman (Stanley Tucci). The movie doesn’t make this as clear as the books do, but the traumas of the games themselves are an opportunity for further personal consumer spending. If you give good show, as Katniss and Peeta do, their mentors can persuade sponsors to buy Tributes necessities ranging from a cup of hot soup to antibiotic creams that arrive, like everything else considered a luxury in this world, in hues and textures that make them look plucked from a Wet ‘n’ Wild line of eye glitter.

What for residents of the Capitol is a matter of consumerist dilettantism is for everyone else a brutal one-person escape valve for an entire continent’s aspirations to rise above their class. Rather than giving everyone an opportunity to improve their lot, Panem requires that its citizens accept unbearable personal risk for even minor improvements in their access to basic resources. Want more grain and oil for your family? You can get it, but only if you’re willing to accept an increased chance of getting picked as a Tribute. Want a opportunity to move your family permanently into better housing, and to win increased food allocations to your district for a year? Then step right up to the Hunger Games—and if you’re lucky enough to survive (particularly when your competition’s been groomed to kill you since birth, making a lie of this theoretical meritocracy) and become a victor, be very aware of the fact that you might have to head back into the arena for the Quarter Quell, held every 25 years, which pits Hunger Games champions against each other. These are menacingly punitive disincentives to want something better, much less to actually reach for it.

The movie, by necessity, has the same problem as Collins’ novel: it’s about the children who have an incomplete view of the system and its incentive structure, rather than the adults who are fully aware of its implications. The full scope of Panem’s culture, politics and technology are frustratingly tempting, and mostly out of view. We know that Katniss’s mother succumbed to depression in the wake of her husband’s death in a mining accident. But we only get a sense of Katniss’s contempt for that failure of will, rather than a sense of the crushing despair her mother must have experienced. Panem took her hopes, and its industry took her husband. She’s old enough to know exactly how sick a joke it is to tell Hunger Games competitors “May the odds be ever in your favor.” The odds are never in your favor.

Keeping the motivations and emotions of adults opaque isn’t the only way the movie adaptation ofThe Hunger Games blunts the full impact of the Capitol’s brutality. It was inevitable, given the age of the novels’ core fan base, that the movie would have to aim to get a PG-13 rating, and it earns that commercially-vital stamp by minimizing the book’s brutal violence at every turn. When Katniss attacks a group of Career tributes with Tracker Jackers, genetically engineered wasps with super-strong venom, the scene’s shot in the same jittery fashion as many of the action sequences, making it hard to see the impact of the bugs clearly. Katniss, who is stung, pries a bow from the dead hands of a girl who is killed by the insects’ venom, and we see her rival’s body through her distorted, hallucinatory vision: it’s a framing that denies both us and Katniss a clear-eyed reckoning with the murder she’s done, even in self-defense. Later, the act that marks Katniss as a rebel is the decision to mourn and decorate the body of a Tribute with whom she’d teamed up with, not in temporary self-interest but out of affinity. But while little Rue’s body, strewn with flowers, is a pathetic, moving sight, most of the other dead female Tributes get the same treatment from the camera: they may be cut, or artfully smeared with mud, but their unmarked skin is flawless, their eyes liquid and glossy even in death. They’re like dead deer, rather than dead people.

We only see the trauma of these deaths, and then only in part, at the very end of the competition when a Career named Cato, who has been the most vicious competitor in the Games, confronts Peeta and Katniss. He’s bloodied and hysterical, aware for the first time that he’s been raised not to win, but to provide an excellent show in the course of his dying. When Katniss kills him, it’s an act of mercy, his torment hidden under a writhing mass of the beasts who are devouring him. She’s Diana, but instead of turning Acteon into a deer and feeding him to the wolves as punishment for him seeing her nakedness, she is dispatching him out of, if not love, contempt for the system that put them both in that position.

But her reward isn’t escape. Instead, Katniss and Peeta are repackaged as consumer goods themselves, dressed up in even more elaborate costumes for their return to Flickerman’s couch, and paraded out on tour for Panem’s citizens to adore. The Hunger Games may be a brutal pageant. They’re also, as it turns out, a form of product testing.

According to the report, as of 2009, low-income children received 70 percent of government funding for children — a respectable portion of overall federal spending dedicated to the needs of those under 18. But while the straight numbers look good for poor kids, those children’s future prospects are frightening.

The Urban Institute “estimate[s] that low-income children receive 99 percent of housing expenditures, 98 percent of expenditures on nutrition, 97 percent of health expenditures, and 94 percent of expenditures on social services.” So, of course, cutting the budgets for these areas would disproportionately affect children:

If these services sound familiar, it’s because many are the same programs that Republicans have aimed to cut in their most recent budget proposals — specifically, housing, nutrition, and health.

Millions of children have been kept out of extreme poverty by programs like food stamps, and the overall poverty rates would have been twice as high in 2010 without the social safety net. Surely, the opposite effect would occur with any cuts to welfare, social security, medicaid, or the other programs that keep these kids afloat.

Food stamps have been key to alleviating poverty during the Great Recession. In 2010, the program kept more than 5 million Americans from falling below the poverty line. Plus, as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities noted today, food stamps reduced the number of children living in extreme poverty — defined as less than $2 per day, before government aid — by half in 2011:

Counting SNAP benefits as income reduces the number of households in extreme poverty in 2011 from 1.46 million to nearly 800,000, the study found. And it reduces the number of children in extreme poverty in 2011 by half — from 2.8 million to 1.4 million…Other studies have also documented SNAP’s powerful poverty-fighting impact. According to the Census Bureau’s Supplemental Poverty Measure, which counts SNAP as income, SNAP kept more than 5 million people out of poverty in 2010.

Food stamps are more critical now than ever, since extreme poverty in the U.S. has doubled in the last 15 years. Overall, the poverty rate in 2010 would have been twice as high as it was were if not for the social safety net.

The number of U.S. households living on less than $2 per person per day — which the study terms “extreme poverty” — more than doubled between 1996 and 2011, from 636,000 to 1.46 million, the study finds. The number of children in extremely poor households also doubled, from 1.4 million to 2.8 million.

While extreme poverty doubled overall, it tripled amongst female headed households. Of course, there’s always the tact taken North Carolina Republican State Representative George Cleveland last week, who simply denied that anyone in his state lives in extreme poverty. As we noted at the time, “the 728,842 North Carolinians who are classified as living in deep poverty might take issue with that assessment.”

Republican State Representative George Cleveland.

How utterly detatched from reality is the conservative crowd running the North Carolina General Assembly? For one good indicator, check out this quote from this morning’s House Select Committee to Dismantle Early Childhood Education — it’s from State Rep. George Cleveland:

“We have nobody in the state of North Carolina living in extreme poverty.”

That’s an abject falsehood, of course. Nearly eight percent of North Carolina’s population lives in deep poverty, which experts define as an income below half of the poverty line, far above the national average. The latest census showed that 17.5 percent of the state lives in poverty, the 13th highest rate in the country.

According to Mark Binker, a reporter for a local paper who was covering the hearings via Twitter, Cleveland attempted to clarify his remarks by explaining that poverty levels were “just a govt agency perpetuating a poverty class.”

The 728,842 North Carolinians who are classified as living in deep poverty might take issue with that assessment. Worse, Cleveland was participating in a hearing by the House Select Committee on Early Childhood Education Development, which had issued a report that outlined recommendations for pre-kindergarten education that would drastically reduce eligibility for the state’s Pre-K program. Studies have shown that young children like the ones who would be pushed out of the state’s pre-k program, are hit hardest by deep poverty.

This is not the first time that Cleveland has attracted some negative attention. In 2007, he told a reporter that a person can identify an undocumented immigrant “if a fella comes in with a pair of shaggy boots on, and jeans and a t-shirt, and he’s got a straw hat on.”

If shows like the Law & Order franchise hammer home how easy it is to get lost in the big city, or to hide yourself in it if you’ve got wickedness in your heart, Justified last night felt like it was making a reverse and perverse case for the ability of rot to flourish in the country. Limehouse’s holler is still the most fascinating place the show’s taken us this season, a little fiefdom anchored by history, tradition, and an absolute refusal to be uprooted by racism. But Delroy’s entrance onto the scene is a reminder that you don’t have to have good intentions to build an enclave. And Arlo’s reappearance in his son’s life at the time when Raylan needs him least is a reminder that neglect to relationships is not determined by geography.

Let’s take Delroy first. There’s no question that he’s a smooth talker, telling Ellen May “My parents raised me in a commune of sorts. I wouldn’t call it hippie, exactly. Mostly dope farmers. But strangely, we were a family. Looked after each other. Just like we do here…It ain’t easy looking after you girls. There’s doctors, and clothing and food, what-not. Porn don’t nearly pay the bills. It’s those pills that keep the roof over our heads…Like everyone else, you must be willing to make a sacrifice,” before sending her back into a situation that nearly got her killed. He may be a pimp, but telling Ellen May “It pains me to do this to you, truly. But you have to learn accountability, just like I had to,” before beating her viciously makes him sound more like a cult leader than a hustler. Ugly things can flourish in isolation, particularly when someone’s willing to pray on people who are exceptionally isolated, like J.J., who corrects Ava’s memory of her, reminding the other woman that Ava remembers her from “Middle school. I never made it to high school.” Justified can be a bit talky this season, but in moments like this when it hammers home the importance of education and the isolation of rural poverty, it delivers tremendous sermons with very few words.

Limehouse may rule his holler with a similarly iron fist, but at least he goes to the trouble of articulating and grounding a code. “Gold chains and champagne and hoes and shit,” he lectures a deputy who’s getting all Emiliano Zapata on him. “Oh, son. We have survived in these hills for 15 decades by staying among ourselves.” I can imagine that Limehouse will wield terrible violence before this season is over, but so far, his game of only giving when he’s got first, his insistence that “The people who bank with me are the ones who have access to the things I know” is a form of insurance. The question becomes what happens when people like Dickie Bennett stop trusting the bank. And while Noble’s Holler has held on to its independence by not challenging white folks directly, amassing power can invite investigation, and as we’ve seen in earlier episodes, interdiction.

Then, there’s Arlo. Alan Sepinwall pointed out that if Arlo’s not faking, “the idea of Raylan having to care for the father he despises — wondering all the time how serious his condition really is — could yield some terrific material,” and I tend to agree. It would be fascinating to see FX become the first network to seriously examine the relationship between middle-aged people and their aging parents, particularly when those adults are under severe pressure. But even if that doesn’t turn out to be the case, Raylan’s relationship with Arlo isn’t something he can bury in the backwoods. Whether it was Arlo’s continued criminality or Quarles’ determination to ferret it out, some things can’t stay dead and buried, even in the backcountry.

There are some Republicans, however, who aren’t subscribing to this agenda. According to a new poll, a majority of low-income Republicans believe that the America’s economic system unfairly favors the wealthy and that the government does not do enough to help the poor:

In a Pew Research Center survey conducted in early October, 57% of lower-income Republican and Republican-leaning voters said the government does too little for poor people. Just 18% said it does too much.

By contrast, higher-income Republicans took the opposite view; by roughly two-to-one (44% to 21%) Republicans with incomes of $75,000 or more said the government does too much, not too little, for poor people.

Indeed, while sharing the public’s general distrust of the government, 70 percent of low-income Republicans agree with the 99 percent movement that “a few rich people and corporations have too much power in the U.S.” And given that nearly half of all Americans are one financial shock away from falling into poverty, it is no wonder that even Republicans are questioning their party’s priorities.

ROMNEY: It was a mistake. I misspoke. I’ve said something that is similar to that, but quite acceptable, for a long time. And you know, when you do I don’t know how many thousands of interviews, now and then you may get it wrong. And I misspoke. Plain and simple.

RALSTON: What did you mean to say?

ROMNEY: Well, what I said was that my focus, my primary focus, is on helping people get in the middle class and grow the middle class. That we have a safety net that cares for the poor, I want to keep that safety net strong and able. The wealthy are doing just fine. But we really need to focus on the middle income people in this country. And you know what, if people are going to go after me when I make a mistake — when I slip up on a word I say, even when I say I got it wrong, sorry, that’s not what I meant — you know that’s part of the political process and I understand that.

Watch it:

However, Romney’s claim that he misspoke flies in the face of the fact that he’s used similar language before to explain his lack of concern for the poor. “The people who need the help the most are not the poor, who have a safety net,” Romney explained during an Oct. 20 town hall at Morningside College in Sioux City, Iowa. “The very poor have a safety net, they’re taken care of,” he said in an October debate.

According to the latest data, the percentage of Americans qualifying as “very poor” — meaning that they live in a household with an income of less than half the federal poverty rate — has hit a 35 year high, so they are decidedly not taken care of. And Romney’s economic plan wouldn’t make them any better off. In fact, Romney would raise taxes on 20 percent of households making between $10,000 and $20,000, because of his less generous tax credits.

Not only that, but his plan would cut critical safety net programs like food stamps and Medicaid, and limit the ability “to leverage federal resources to provide necessary social services to assist people in need.” As the Center for American Progress Action Fund’s Desmond Brown wrote, Romney’s plan “would provide $2.24 trillion in tax breaks to the superrich while cutting $2.17 trillion from critical health care services for poor and elderly Americans.”

The bill’s sponsor Rep. Charles Boustany Jr. (R-LA) says he’s trying to close a “strip-club loophole” which allows beneficiaries of the federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program use state-issued debit cards at strip clubs, casinos, and liquor stores. “It’s pretty rampant around the country,” he insists.

Naturally, no one thinks adult entertainment is an appropriate use for TANF funds. But as Center for American Progress Action Fund’s Melissa Boteach notes, the use of funds at strip clubs, liquor stores, and casinos is hardly a “pressing national crisis,” but rather a politically valuable message for the GOP, regardless of its veracity, because it’s useful to the GOP to paint vulnerable Americans as “delinquent and criminally inclined“:

But putting politics above policy in this crass way is unfortunate and cynical. The Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or TANF, program has experienced benefit cuts of more than 20 percent, after adjusting for inflation, even as the Great Recession and the slow economic recovery have caused elevated levels of unemployment and poverty. Many low-income workers on TANF are unable to access the child care they need to make work possible and ultimately end up paying nearly half their income towards care for their children. And low-wage workers are constantly facing the threat of a layoff because more than 80 percent lack access to a single paid sick day to take care of themselves, a sick kid, or an elderly relative.

And the big vote on TANF is about strip clubs?

This vote represents yet another instance in the creeping trend of conservatives to demonize the poor — and then threaten anyone who votes against the legislation with supporting “welfare spending” for strip club admissions. The tactic enables conservatives to imply that tough economic circumstances somehow make poor people delinquent and criminally inclined.

Boustany pushes the common refrain that such bills are an “obligation to make sure taxpayer dollars are spent appropriately.” But as Boteach points out, TANF and other social safety net programs are already subject to federal and state audits. And for measures like drug-testing welfare recipients, such proposals can cost thousands to catch one drug user because the positive test rate is so low.

At a time when nearly half of the U.S population is just one financial shock away from poverty, Republicans should focus on bolstering the very programs that ensure the economic security of families. Instead, Republicans seem committed to push a strip club stereotype for a political win while stripping vulnerable Americans of a safety net.

ROMNEY: I’m not concerned with the very poor. We have a safety net there. 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 the America. [..]

HOST: You just said said, ‘I’m not concerned about the very poor because they have a safety net.’ But I think there are a lot of very poor Americans who are struggling who would say, that sounds odd. [...]

ROMNEY: The challenge right now — we will hear from the Democrat party the plight of the poor. And there’s no question it’s not good being poor. And we have a safety net to help those that are very poor, but campaign is focused is on middle-income Americans. My campaign — you can choose where to focus. You can focus on the rich, that’s not my focus. You can focus on the very poor, that’s not my focus.

Watch it:

Later, Romney said, “we have a very ample safety net and we can talk about whether it needs to be strengthened or whether there are holes in it. But we have food stamps, we have Medicaid, we have housing vouchers, we have programs to help the poor.”

Romney’s claim that the safety net is “very ample” suggests a lack of understanding . While safety net programs kept seven million Americans out of poverty in 2010, according to a study from the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, government assistance fell far short of insulating all, or even most, poor Americans.

But his comment is especially tone deaf considering that Romney has proposed weakening many of these safety net programs. Under Romney’s proposed reductions in federal spending, it’s likely that Medicaid would be cut by $153 billion by 2016, the food stamp program would have to throw 10 million low-income people off the rolls, and a key program supporting poor children’s health would face cumulative cuts of $946 billion through 2021. As ThinkProgress’ Igor Volsky has said that Romney is living in a “dream world” when he claims his Medicaid cuts won’t hurt the poor.

And Romney’s tax plan suggests his focus is really on the wealthy, as it includes massive giveaways to upper-income earners and investors, while doing almost nothing for middle- and low-income Americans.