The story about Santorum's comments (here) gets more interesting. My summary of what he seems to be saying is this:
"..bottom line is I don't want to make bla?k people's lives better by giving them somebody else's money..
Now what could that missing letter be? I'll go for "n", given that I'm the polite goddess. But you draw your own conclusions.
Santorum says:
I’ve looked at that quote, in fact I looked at the video. In fact, I’m pretty confident I didn’t say black. I started to say is a word and then sort of changed and it sort of — blah — mumbled it and sort of changed my thought.The whole point might be trivial except that Santorum seems especially concerned about the blank people getting someone else's money, as opposed to the not-blank people.
That's not what I wanted to write about. Dependency! That's what I wanted to write about. Here's Santorum:
When the AP asked Santorum about the statement, he replied, “If you look at what I’ve been saying, I’ve been pretty clear about my concern for dependency in this country and concern for people not being more dependent on our government, whatever their race or ethnicity is.”Dependency is a term that should be defined carefully. Santorum pretty wants wives to be financially dependent on their husbands and doesn't appear to have any opinions about dependency and those who are born with trust funds. What he has trouble with is dependency on the government, except perhaps when it is firms which are subsidized or bailed out repeatedly.
Writing about dependency in real terms might be useful. What's not useful is this tradition of seeing any governmental safety net as equal to life-long dependency.