Yesterday on the campaign trail, Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney said he’s “concerned about the poor in this country” and the unravelling of the social safety net. In this clip from Current TV’s “Countdown with Keith Olbermann,” guest host David Schuster welcomes columnist and economics director for Yahoo! Finance Daniel Gross to discuss Governor Romney’s sudden re-discovery of “compassionate conservatism.”

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Gross argues that Romney is professing his concern for the middle class as a purely cynical means of defusing charges that a man who’s worth 250 million dollars is out of touch with working class America. “Romney’s only concern about the poor,” he says, “is that they’ll vote this year.”

He goes on to state that while Romney may be giving lip-service to caring about the problem of income inequality in the U.S., he is offering nothing, policy-wise, except retreads of Reagan’s “trickle-down” economics.

Watch the clip, embedded via Current TV, below: