Actions Speak Louder

The book just came out last week. I haven’t yet read it, and if you think I’m tossing $18 or whatever it’s going for at your local bookstore in Santorum’s general direction, think again. But I have seen excerpts, some of which are every bit as disingenuous as I might have expected. Then again, you might be interested to know that I actually agree with Santorum on at least one point.

It’s not the part where Santorum insinuates that abortion is worse than slavery (“But unlike abortion today, in most states even the slaveholder did not have the unlimited right to kill his slave.”) Nor is it the part where he lambastes the “weird socialization” of public schools, noting that “it’s amazing that so many kids turn out to be fairly normal.”

Rather, it has to do with this: “In far too many families with young children, both parents are working, when, if they really took an honest look at the budget, they might confess that both of them really don’t need to, or at least may not need to work as much as they do.”

Now, you can argue, as some have, that Santorum is accusing working parents of greed. And maybe there’s something to that; not that Santorum would know anything about it, but there are many, many families where both parents must work to pay the bills. But at heart, Santorum has a valid point; that there are some families whose “need” to work is directly attributable to the mortgage payment on the McMansion or the lease on the new Beemer. More modest choices might have lessened the need for so much income and could, ultimately, lead to more quality time with the kids.

The question is, what to do about this? Santorum seems to posit this as a moral question. But as usual, it’s not quite that simple. In fact, we might ask: Have the policies Rick Santorum supported during his years in Congress made it easier and more affordable for families to keep a parent at home? Santorum has been a major recipient of campaign funds from the pharmaceutical industry, receiving more than $90,000 in recent years, according to the Center for Responsive Democracy. Perhaps not coincidentally, Santorum has consistently voted in favor of these interests in Congress — voting against the re-importation of drugs from Canada, for example, and consistently defending drugmakers from allegations of price-gouging.

Now, you tell me — does the price of medicine have a fiscal impact on American families? And if so, how do these votes square with Santorum’s professed desire to get families to make more austere choices? There is also the matter of Santorum’s opposition to raising the minimum wage. He has voted against it on numerous occasions, though earlier this year he actually sponsored a bill that would have raised it by $1.10 per hour over two years. But that’s not quite as magnanimous as it sounds, as critics labeled the plan a “Trojan Horse” with provisions that, among other things, might have eroded overtime rights and barred states and municipalities from passing laws to raise the minimum base pay for tipped restaurant workers, who now can be paid as little as $2.13 an hour.

Perhaps not coincidentally, one of Santorum’s major donors has been the 70,000-employee Outback Steakhouse chain, which has one of the country’s biggest corporate political action committees and has given more than $8,000 to Santorum since January via its PAC and a Florida fund-raiser.

That’s not to say that helping out your corporate paymasters is always detrimental to families. And Santorum has supported measures that would provide tax breaks to families; in some cases, he seems to grasp the degree to which government policy can influence the choices families make.

In other cases, first things first. And that might not be so offensive if his second impulse - his first being to pocket the cash - wasn’t to turn around and preach to the rest of us, telling us to make the moral choice and pull ourselves up by our bootstraps. We’d love to, Senator. Too bad some of your actions are making it more difficult.