The Washington Times reports that Rick Santorum is putting forth amendments to a spending bill being considered by the Senate in order to demonstrate his approach to fighting poverty.
What does Rick's anti-poverty program consist of? Job training funds? No. Improving access to higher education? No. A living-wage bill? No. Encouraging marriage and charitable giving? YEP.
What works, Mr. Santorum said, is building strong marriages and families and communities that depend on each other, not government. "The Democrats fundamentally get it wrong," he said.
His proposed amendments call for funding to promote marriage and teach fathers to be more responsible -- two pieces of the stalled Republican welfare-reform bill -- as well as funding to provide technical help to small charities, and to determine through a commission which federal social programs could be restructured as vouchers. The proposals call for about $411 million in grant money and represent pieces of the 12-point anti-poverty agenda introduced by Senate Republican leaders last spring.
Mr. Santorum also will try to attach a $7 billion charitable-giving proposal to a separate piece of legislation next week. The long-stalled charity bill would create a series of tax incentives to encourage individuals and companies to give to faith-based and secular social service charities.
"This is an opportunity for us to ... put forth some ideas," he said.
As an interesting aside to his new war on poverty, yesterday Rick voted against an amendment that would have increased the maximum amount of Pell Grants. Pell Grants are need-based grants given to students to help them pay for college.
This isn't particularly surprising considering what Rick told us in his book about college and poor women:
"The notion that college education is a cost-effective way to help poor, low-skill, unmarried mothers with high school diplomas or GEDs move up the economic ladder is just wrong."
It seems that Rick believes that the most "cost-effective way to help poor, low-skill, unmarried mothers with high school diplomas or GEDs move up the economic ladder" is to have them get married. However, we're still not sure what Rick thinks is a cost-effective way for poor, low-skill fathers, or married mothers, to move up the economic ladder. We suppose he'll let those "faith-based and secular social service charities" figure that out with the $7 billion he apparently wants to funnel to them.
