[Vision2020] Santorum’s Gospel of Inequality

[Art Deco]

  [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>

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February 17, 2012
Santorum’s Gospel of Inequality By CHARLES M. BLOW

“Santorum Praises Income Inequality.”

That was Fox News’s
headline<http://nation.foxnews.com/rick-santorum/2012/02/16/santorum-praises-income-inequality>about
Rick Santorum’s speech at the Detroit Economic Club on Thursday.
Santorum said, “I’m not about equality of result when it comes to income
inequality. There is income inequality in America. There always has been
and, hopefully, and I do say that, there always will be.”

Unbelievable. Maybe not, but stunning all the same.

Then again, Santorum is becoming increasingly unhinged in his public
comments. Last week, he said that the president was arguing that Catholics
would have to “hire women
priests<http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=uoeHuV_6Kkw>to
comply with employment discrimination issues.”

Also last week, he suggested that liberals and the president were leading
religious people into oppression and even
beheadings<http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/02/09/santorum-obama-leading-christians-to-the-guillotine/>.
I kid you not. Santorum said: “They are taking faith and crushing it. Why?
When you marginalize faith in America, when you remove the pillar of
God-given rights, then what’s left is the French Revolution. What’s left is
a government that gives you rights. What’s left are no unalienable rights.
What’s left is a government that will tell you who you are, what you’ll do
and when you’ll do it. What’s left in France became the guillotine.”

Yet for Santorum to champion income inequality in Detroit, of all places,
is still incredibly tone-deaf.

Detroit has the highest poverty rate of any big city in America, according
to data provided by Andrew A. Beveridge, a demographer at Queens College.
Among the more than 70 cities with populations over 250,000, Detroit’s
poverty rate topped the list at a whopping 37.6 percent, more than twice
the national poverty
rate<http://www.census.gov/newsroom/releases/archives/income_wealth/cb11-157.html>.
And according to the Census Bureau, median household income in
Detroit<http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/26/2622000.html>from
2006-10 was just $28,357, which was only 55 percent of the
overall U.S. median
<http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/00000.html>household income
over that time.

This is a city that last year announced plans to close half its public
schools<http://money.cnn.com/2011/02/22/news/economy/detroit_school_restructuring/index.htm>and
send
layoff notices to every teacher in the
system<http://money.cnn.com/2011/04/15/news/economy/detroit_teachers/index.htm>.


This is a city where the mayor’s pledge to demolish 10,000 abandoned
structures was seen as only shaving the tip of the iceberg because, as The
Wall Street Journal reported in
2010<http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703950804575242433435338728.html>,
“the city has roughly 90,000 abandoned or vacant homes and residential
lots, according to Data Driven Detroit, a nonprofit that tracks demographic
data for the city.”

This is not the place to praise income inequality. Last week, at a hearing
before the Senate Budget Committee, Kent Conrad, the chairman of that
committee, laid out the issue as many Americans see
it<http://budget.senate.gov/democratic/index.cfm/committeehearings?ContentRecord_id=b1fdd1a8-e28e-4d1e-a6e2-8797f75d97e1&ContentType_id=14f995b9-dfa5-407a-9d35-56cc7152a7ed&Group_id=d68d31c2-2e75-49fb-a03a-be915cb4550b>:


“The growing gap between the very wealthy and everyone else has serious
ramifications for the country. It hinders economic growth, it undermines
confidence in our institutions, and it goes against one of the core ideals
of this country — that if you work hard and play by the rules, you can
succeed and leave a better future for your kids and your grandkids.”

This is arguably even more true of people in Michigan than for the rest of
us. Even though income inequality in the Detroit area isn’t particularly
high, looking at the issue as an urban one in the case of cities like
Detroit is problematic. The whole region took a hit. The comparison for
cities like Detroit may be more intra-city than inter-city.

As Willy Staley argued in 2010 in an online column for Next American
City<http://americancity.org/columns/entry/2610/>magazine: “In richer
cities, the inequality is put side-by-side, in an
uncomfortable, loathsome way; for cities left in the dust of
deindustrialization, the inequality is presents (sic) as existing between
cities, not within them. Gone is the city/suburb divide between rich and
poor, income inequality manifests itself within wealthy cities and between
cities.”

And it is this feeling of being left behind by the American economy and
abandoned by Republicans that is pushing Michigan into the blue. Public
Policy Polling, a Democratic polling company, found this week that Obama
would handily defeat all the Republican candidates in head-to-head matchups
in the state. The company’s president, Dean Debnam, said in a statement:
“Michigan is looking less and less like it will be in the swing state
column this fall.” He continued, “Barack Obama’s numbers in the state are
improving, while the Republican field is heading in the other direction.”

Santorum went on to say about income inequality during his speech on
Thursday: “We should celebrate like we do in the small towns all across
America — as you do here in Detroit. You celebrate success. You build
statues and monuments. Buildings, you name after them. Why? Because in
their greatness and innovation, yes, they created wealth, but they created
wealth for everybody else. And that’s a good thing, not something to be
condemned in America.”

Santorum might want to take a walk around Detroit to see who’s celebrating
and to see how many statues he can find to honor people who simply invented
something and got rich.

Furthermore, as a newspaperman and a former Detroiter, I’d like to direct
him to the James J. Brady Memorial. Detroit1701.org<http://detroit1701.org/>,
maintained by a University of Michigan emeritus professor, calls it “one of
the more attractive memorials in Detroit.” It pays tribute to Brady, a
federal tax collector, who set out to address the issue of child poverty in
the city by founding the Old Newsboys’ Goodfellows of Detroit
Fund<http://www.detroitgoodfellows.org/home.html>in 1914 — what is
essentially a local welfare fund.

The group provides “warm clothing, toys, books, games and candy” to local
children every Christmas in addition to sending poor children to summer
camps, the dentist and to college.

Then again, charitable giving doesn’t appear to be high on Motor Mouth
Santorum’s list of priorities. As The Washington Post pointed
out<http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/post/romney-and-obama-vie-for-title-of-most-charitable-santorum-gave-least-to-charity/2012/02/16/gIQA3YPyHR_blog.html>,
based on Santorum’s tax return disclosure this week, he has given the least
amount to charity of the four presidential candidates who have disclosed
their tax returns. (Ron Paul has not.) His charitable giving was just 1.8
percent of his adjusted gross income.

The Obamas were the highest, giving 14.2 percent, even though their income
was second lowest.

Maybe that’s the imbalance we should praise.


-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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