Please eliminate my 'multiple added points'. What do you believe that Rick Santorum is right about?
“Please eliminate my ‘multiple added points’. What do you believe that Rick Santorum is right about?”
I know you were not addressing me but I would like to take a crack at this. He was not right about anything really in the purpose of his remarks. But accidently, I think he is on to something. It isn’t that the GOP doesn’t care for the poor. Au Contraire, they care a great deal. It is just that they have ceded the field to caring about the poor to the democrats and their media pushed narrative, namely, that unless you are talking welfare and tax increases you hate the poor.
The reason the GOP-e can’t break out of the gravitational hold of this narrative is simple, they can’t embrace conservative/Christian ideas. For one, give a man a fish you have fed him for a day, teach a man to fish, you have fed him for life. Instead, they run from those teachings and arguments and apologize for them. They simply surrender and leave “caring for the poor” as a democrat pillar.
Ironic, is it not that the truth of the matter is that democrats and their policies create poverty purposefully all in the name of vote getting. And the GOP-e just sits silently, excepting the premise that capitalism and free markets actually hurt the poor. They slink from election to election hoping the poor will not turn out to vote against them because, Lord knows, they certainly are not giving them any reason or argument to vote for them.
I think he’s correct in the sense that the GOP and conservatives treat the poor as enemies who need to be punished. All of us would be better served if we treated them as the victims of democrats that they are.
While I don’t agree with him on tax credits to the poor I do agree that we can’t whip the slaves off the plantation.
The need for entitlement reform is obvious but I think regulatory and tax reform should come first to create jobs for poor people to go to. Personally I’d eliminate the tax on manufacturing and roll back regulation to a reasonable level as a means of spurring job creation. And THEN I would start whittling away at the welfare state. There is also immigration hurting the poor.
The republicans also need to learn to effectively show the poor how the democrats are using them. One example is the oil trains carrying Bakken oil. Some of those trains roll through heavily populated areas of Detroit and no one is warning them of the danger Obama is putting them in by standing in the way of pipelines. If there is a disaster, democrats will run down there and immediately blame the oil companies and republicans.
Its also important to note that not all poor are democrat voters. Myself for instance am dirt poor but would rather go without than take dirty money or vote democrat. I don’t want anyone to do anything for me or give anything to me. I want a government to do the right thing which is to set America free to prosper the best way we can.