Confessions of a 22-year Santorum observer: “He does not tell the truth.”
Jerry Bowyer is an outstanding economist, businessman, talk-radio host, and author. He has known Rick Santorum for 22 years, from the very start of his political career. He remained silent about Rick’s presidential bid, choosing not to speak out about several problems he’s seen over the years, assuming the truth would get out—until now.
“He was no longer my business,” writes Bowyer. But after Rick made some unjustified criticism publicly about a close friend and business colleague, Bowyer changed his mind: “Rick made himself my business.” What follows is a fairly long article detailing Bowyer’s problem with Santorum.
In summary, “he does not tell the truth. He makes things up as he goes along, assuming no one will check.”
Bowyer adds, “When the people of Pennsylvania figured that out, they were done with him and fired him as their Senator, and Rick even lied about that.”
He goes on to explain four big examples from the former Senator. I cannot in fairness cover them all here. I will content myself with the first one which illustrates not only the problem with falsehoods, but Santorum’s belief in big-government, cronyism, and Keynesian economics (I highly encourage the reader to click through and read the entire article, especially for those who believe in “Saint” Santorum):
The first big lie Santorum ever told me was in 1997. Santorum was one of the leaders of a group that was pushing for a regional tax hike which would be used to fund a large stimulus program. The plan was called the Regional Renaissance Initiative and it was chaired by a business executive who, along with his wife, was also one of Santorum’s earliest and largest financial contributors.
The plan was to create a multi-government authority which would take the new tax money and use it to attract state and federal tax money in various matching programs. The chief projects were a tax funded baseball park, football stadium and convention center. The main political sponsor was Pittsburgh‘s Democratic mayor, Tom Murphy. The main business sponsor was the Allegheny Conference, a group representing large corporations which had a history of support for tax hikes, urban renewal and various other government-centered development projects.
[Jerry writes about this project more here.]
I debated Santorum several times on TV and in person on this topic. He, and his team, asserted the typical Keynesian arguments about public works projects. They trotted out studies from local groups which used Keynesian multiplier models to argue that this government spending would more than pay for itself in economic development. They argued, much like the supporters of Obama’s government stimulus programs do, that this spending program would be a jobs generator.
Santorum added some odd cultural arguments, claiming that a tax-funded stadium would be ‘like an old-fashioned Amish barn raising’. I led the opposition to the plan, arguing that whatever alleged multipliers Rick and his allies could reasonably suggest would flow in a positive way from the spending, they would be more than offset by the negative multipliers of the tax hikes, and that barn raisings, unlike taxes, were voluntary.
Bowyer explains how the effort was defeated in all 11-counties involved, but Santorum was not done trying to ram it down the necks of the people. He went over their heads and bolstered a massive lobbying effort at the State level, after having denied there would be any such effort to do so. This included taking half a billion dollars in federal subsidies.
Rick never acknowledged the error of his oft-made guarantees that voting down the tax would mean the inevitable loss of the teams, nor of his broken promises to abide by the will of the people. Nor has he addressed the tension between his claims to be a Tea Party kind of a guy and his arrogant dismissal of anti-tax activists who opposed the massively funded campaign in David vs. Goliath fashion. Nor has he explained to the conservative base of his party how he supported a plan which involved numerous high-profile takings of private property under the guise of eminent domain for the purpose of private economic development projects.