Op-Ed Columnist
Santorum’s Gospel of Inequality
By CHARLES M. BLOW
Published: February 17, 2012
“Santorum Praises Income Inequality.”
That was Fox News’s headline
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 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.
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. And according to the Census Bureau, median household income in Detroit from 2006-10 was just $28,357, which was only 55 percent of the overall U.S. median household income over that time.
This is a city that last year announced plans to close half its public schools and send layoff notices to every teacher in the system.
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,
“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:
“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
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,
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 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,
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.