Friday, December 30, 2011

Rick Rolling The Country

Rick Santorum has a frothily exciting plan to solve poverty:  get hitched and graduate, poor people!

“Do you know if you do two things in your life — if you do two things in your life, you’re guaranteed never to be in poverty in this country? What two things, that if you do, will guarantee that you will not be in poverty in America?” he asked the crowd.

Number one, graduate from high school. Number two, get married. Before you have children,” he said. “If you do those two things, you will be successful economically. What does that mean to a society if everybody did that? What that would mean is that poverty would be no more. If you want to have a strong economy, there are two basic things we can do.”

I'm sure that's news to the millions of married working poor in this 2004 study and these latest figures showing that some 8-10% of married couples with kids are in fact below the poverty line.

Sure, you're more likely to be in poverty in a one-income family headed by a single mother.  But the notion that a high-school diploma and marriage prevents poverty completely as Santorum claims is pretty ludicrous.  The real issue with poverty is jobs and education, and Republicans are pretty keen on cutting the social net in order to "force" people to take jobs, like cutting medicine will force people to stop being sick.

And yes, there are people with advanced degrees on food stamps. It happens.  How does Santorum explain that away?  Also, he's completely against same-sex marriage, which would increase the number of married couples in the country.

He's Rick rolling voters.

No comments:

Related Posts with Thumbnails