Rick Santorum Nails Obama and Liberals on the Reasons for “Income Inequality”

No President wants to spend his time in office “managing the decline” of America. So, a good bit of ink and hot air have already been expended in this year’s presidential campaign debating whether or not America is in decline, militarily and economically, and if it is -- what to do about it.

This is a debate that will be with us long after the November election, so we can come back to the alleged decline of American diplomatic and military power. Today, we concern ourselves only with liberal complaints that America is in economic decline due to “income inequality” and where, as President Obama put it in his State of the Union address, “a growing number of Americans barely get by.”

So who should Republicans choose to answer Obama’s charges that income inequality and economic unfairness are the “defining issue of our time?” From our perspective, former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum is the candidate with the simplest and most compelling answer.

Of course, before we get to the answer we have to ask the right question: is the American economy in decline?

The financial meltdown of 2008 brought down the U.S. economy in both real and relative terms, but by the broadest measure of economic strength – Gross Domestic Product or GDP – the economy has rebounded and is now well above pre-meltdown levels. So where is the decline?

The decline, it turns out, is in personal income, not national economic output.

In real terms, personal incomes have fallen off a cliff since Obama became President. According to Felix Salmon of Reuters, median household income was at $49,909 at the end 0f 2011, down $3,609 -- or 6.7% -- in the two years since the recession allegedly ended. It was as high as $55,309 in December 2007, when the recession began.

Who is bearing the brunt of this decline? The uneducated and unmarried, that’s who.

According to CNN, families headed by a married couple have only a 6.2% poverty rate, whereas families with a single mother have a 31.6% rate, and families with a single father have a 15.8% rate.

Likewise, the difference in income based on education has an equally startling effect on one’s economic prospects. Workers 18 and over with bachelors degrees earn an average of $51,206 a year, while those with a high school diploma earn $27,915. And workers with an advanced degree make an average of $74,602, but those without a high school diploma earn an average of $18,734.

Just having a breadwinner that is a high school graduate is enough to keep a family of four above the federal poverty level. Just being in a family headed by a married couple means your chances of being in poverty are 500 percent less than those of a family headed by a single mother.

Now, if you are Barack Obama, and his liberal allies, you must discount the choices individuals make to have children out of wedlock -- or to drop out of high school -- or not take what looks like menial work.

However, as Rick Santorum pointed out, it gets even worse. The Obama administration wants to prevent poor children from even learning what a good economic choice could be, because such information contravenes the liberal goal of creating a values-free society.

As Santorum told FOX News, a well known Brookings Institution study showed that graduating from high school and getting married before you have a child -- and then getting a job, any job -- are the ways to avoid poverty. However, “The Obama administration now has regulations that [say you] can no longer promote marriage as a way of avoiding poverty… They have to be neutral with respect to how people behave. The problem is neutrality ends in poverty, neutrality ends in choices that hurt people’s lives… That is absolutely unconscionable.”

All of the Republican presidential contenders have great talking points on how Obama’s regulations are stifling business, the need for more domestic energy production and a whole host of good ideas to stimulate the broader economy. However, if the defining issue of our time is, as Obama claims, America’s economic decline caused by growing income inequality, then none of those ideas puts the problem, and its solution, back on Obama the way Rick Santorum’s three simple points do: graduate from high school, get married before you have children and then take a job, any job.