Judging by their rhetoric, most of the GOP presidential candidates — mindful of Mitt Romney’s 2012 loss amid a sluggish recovery that was supposed to turn the election into a referendum on Obama’s economy — recognize that they need to improve this perception. They all talk regularly about inequality and stagnating wages. Party leaders such as Paul Ryan have undertaken poverty tours that have somehow managed to get splashed all over the newspapers.

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But while the tax plans from candidates such as Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush do contain some middle class tax relief, they also deliver large windfalls to the top earners, with Rubio’s in particular eliminating capital gains taxes. And the basic argument these candidates are making is the same old case that restraining government is the way to help the middle class. They are vowing to roll back Obama era redistributive policies such as the Affordable Care Act and replace them with policies that will spend less government money and help fewer people, while advocating against a minimum wage hike to keep pace with inflation. The basic story they are telling is that there is currently too much government-engineered downward redistribution of wealth, and rolling that back is the way to unleash growth, raise wages, and spread more prosperity.

However, the Pew poll also finds this (click to enlarge):

Large majorities think the federal government in general does not do enough to help either middle class or poor people. Meanwhile, an equally large majority thinks the federal government already does too much to help the rich.

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Republicans have been arguing that, yes, the federal government does do too much to help the wealthy, via “crony capitalism” and so forth (Rubio has attacked the ACA on this basis). No doubt Republicans are also salivating at the chance to hammer Hillary Clinton as a stooge of Wall Street, based on her speaking fees, among other things (the fact that she would stiffen financial oversight while Republicans would weaken it will not prove even a minor inconvenience in making this case). But their argument for doing something about government helping the wealthy (reforming and shrinking it) is deeply intertwined with their argument that the way to help middle class and poor people is to scale back current government efforts to do just that. Yet the Pew poll shows that majorities want government to do more for those people.

And so, if Republicans stick with their current course, they’ll have to figure out how to make the case, broadly speaking, that doing the former (rolling back government efforts to help middle class and poor people) actually accomplishes the latter (does more to help them). The ongoing comedy in the House, where Paul Ryan continues to vow an alternative to Obamacare, years and years after first making this promise, underscores this problem. So does this amazing episode in Iowa, in which Ted Cruz was confronted by a constituent who said his brother-in-law had only gotten health insurance from the ACA late in life and died from tumors soon after. Asked what he would replace the law with, Cruz said the brother-in-law would have gotten insurance if there had been fewer government regulations, pre-ACA.

Rubio has offered some proposals premised on the idea that Republicans need to re-craft a policy agenda geared towards middle class economic concerns. But his primary answer to the above conundrum seems to be that his biography (his stirring tale of realizing the American Dream after being raised by humble immigrant parents) will enable him to repackage conservative economic solutions as pro-middle class. He argues, for instance, that eliminating capital gains taxes will unleash investment that will lead to the employment of more bartenders like his father.

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