Does being poor prove you are qualified to repair and manage the US economy?

Why would it? Doesn’t being “poor” (which I do not accept that Rick Santorum is) simply mean that you are not good at earning money nor would you be for the country?

Not IMO. I have been on both sides of just about every fence there is, and whether in times of prosperity or times of belt tightening squeezed to the last notch lol I would not feel, at all qualified to make decisions for the masses. God fucking gawd..no! haha

I know what has worked for me, but I could never presume to know what methodology would be a one size fits all. Being “poor” may lend itself to heightened humility but does not a financial advisor make.

Qualification comes from experience. Rather, Santorum is likely trying to distance himself from the others.

I think it’s more about integrity than the actual money.

The more loaded a person is the more people will wonder where their loyalties lie. If a presidental candidate has a history of taking significant kickbacks from insurance companies, what would stop them from deciding that medicare needed to be slashed in order to “balance the budget”? If you’re not that loaded then it’s less likely that you’re being bought.

Even the real “poor” of the US aren’t really “poor” when you compare us to the rest of the world. Santorum is just the most “common” of the candidates.

Interesting question. I guess for me the issue is what do you know about issues. Further, how much does your life experience create your knowledge of issues? If you are poor, do you understand the importance of welfare and housing programs implicitly?

If you have never had much of a budget to balance, what will you do when you have the biggest budget in the world to balance? How much does it matter, anyway? Aren’t these decisions in the hands of Congress, anyway?

We elect politicians to make choices. They try to sell their choice-making abilities based on their areas of expertise. Being poor might make you sympathetic to the issues of the poor and more likely to make choices the poor will like. Being rich might make you sympathetic to the issues of business. Being a lawyer might make you sympathetic to the issues of… lawyers? Being a parent makes you understand the issues of parents, like education. Being the actor’s union chief might make you sympathetic to the issues of working people.

It’s hard to say, and I think that in the case of being poor, there is no telling what it has made you more understanding of. So poverty is not necessary a qualification nor not a qualification for anything. It really depends on what you have made of your poverty.

Santorum is a lawyer, I think. He’s also a professional Christian. I don’t think poverty much fits in his credentials. But that’s not really what this question is about, is it?

One of the weird twists of political fate in U.S. history is what happened to Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt. Hoover came from extremely modest circumstances and became a millionaire in a story that ‘reads like something out of an Indiana Jones script, with touches of Dickens and the memoirs of Albert Schweitzer’. Roosevelt was unto the manor born. Yet Hoover ended up shouldering much of the blame for the Great Depression and Roosevelt usually makes it near the top of the lists of greatest-ever Presidents for his handling of the Great Depression and World War Two.

Hoover certainly was humanitarian-minded, but he was boxed in by political circumstances as President that Roosevelt proved capable of punching through.

Returning to the present… Republicans are coming to the table of economic populism rather late in the day if you ask me. I wouldn’t hold Romney’s wealth (inherited and earned one way or the other) against him if his statements didn’t give the distinct appearence that he is crudely pandering to the middle class while giving poverty in this country the short shrift.

I am live in Pennsylvania and remember being twice embarrassed, first that Bush was president and secondly that Rick Santorum was one of our senators. He embarrassed us by interfering in a family dispute over a dying brain dead woman. Then there was no law that controlled what happens in the bedroom that he was not prepared to legislate.

I don’t get all of these statements about individual freedom. He seems more interested in legislation our morality than the Pope.

No, neither does being rich. Neither does managing a company and firing a lot of people.

Realistically, nothing does. And when did steering the economy become the domain of the President? Isn’t it simply a lot bigger than one man?

As a general statement, if the poor understood the marketplace (i.e. the economy) far fewer of them would be poor.

Being poor does not make one capable of managing the US Economy. Being poor does generally make one feel empathy for your fellow Americans who live in poverty & it tends to make you aware that CEO’s make too much money & the fact that they are greedy for even more. It does not convey any real insight into the answers that are needed for our economy to survive. It does give you a clarity of vision to recognize those politicians than have no concern at all for the Americans who live in poverty & no desire to help them in any way. This includes all four of the Republican want-to-be candidates for president.

@Linda_Owl

It does not include Dr. Paul. You obviously do not know anything about him or you would never make a statement like that.

Being rich or poor ( which categories I take issue with ) has nothing to do with how well you understand the American economy. Being knowledgable and intelligent have a great deal with understanding how the American economy works.

Well there is no better way to emphasize with the suffering of others than to experience it yourself. Politicians who use this tactice see the obvious benefits from trying to sell themselves to the voters as an ‘Average Joe’ type who can identify with their problems.

@marinelife Agreed on both points. Poverty does not quilify one as an investment advisor, and Rick Santorum isn’t poor.

@Coloma Where’s your spirit of adventure?

@Nullo I am sure that’s what Mr. Santorum is trying to do, and apparently with some effect against Romney.

@sinscriven I reckon that depends on the person. If it were Warren Buffet of Bill Gates, I don’t think anyone would worry that they cheated their way to the top. Santorum appears not to have cashed in while in the Senate. Even on a Senator’s salary and benefits, his net worth was txtremely low as the Senate goes. But he has vastly increased his wealth since losing office, and that has been largely through working for a lobbying firm, while not “lobbying”. Draw your own conclusions as to what that really means.

@missingbite That’s definitely true, but I think for this question we are talking about poverty as it is understood here in the USA. And it’s no picnic here either.

@wundayatta “Santorum is a lawyer, I think. He’s also a professional Christian. I don’t think poverty much fits in his credentials. But that’s not really what this question is about, is it?”

Yes, Santorum is a lawyer with a JD degree from Penn State and a MBA from the University of Pittsburgh. Santorum’s net worth is estimated at between $880,000 and $1.9 million. Not poor by any means, but he is the least wealthy of the current GOP contenders. The constantly self deprecating Ron Paul is actually worth as much as $5 million.

And no, this question was not about the reality of his claim of being a man of modest means, but about whether that claim, if true, means he’s well qualified to lead the Congress toward rebuilding the US economy.

@hiphiphopflipflapflop That is an excellent point. A president’s ability to manage this economy has far more to do with his ability to use the bully pulpit effectively than with his net worth. Despite all the campaign promises about what they will do on day one, we aren’t electing a king or a dictator. The President has no control of the purse strings. That is left to Congress, which of late has been an almost entirely dysfunctional legislative body. What matters is the ability that Hoover lacked and FDR had in abundance to speak to the people, and to use the bully pulpit to move a recalcitrant Congress to do the right thing. This can only happen if the President knows what the right thing to do is, and is articulate enough to communicate that to the electorate and the legislators, leaving them no room to equivocate for their own profit; but forcing them to act in the interest of “We the People”.

It is interesting that while all four Republican contenders have put forward policy platforms that would help increase the wealth inequality and deplete the middle class by transferring their money to the very wealthy, Romney’s policies are the lest egregious on that front. Up from poverty Santorum would go much further in giving additional tax breaks to billionaires and taxing the poor. Gingrich and Paul would be the worst offenders in that respect. They favor policies that would rapidly turn us into a third-world banana republic.

@Ron_C The individual freedom and small government thing is really simple to understand. Fortunately for clatity’s sake, all the Republican primary contenders with the possible exception of Ron Paul (who has no chance of winning) are of one mind on this. Government must be shrunk down to the point it fits in every woman’s vagina, and in every bedroom in America, and in every alley and dark corner where any two or more people might possible kiss, touch or findle one another. When the Founders guaranteed separation of church and state, they didn;t really mean that. They actually meant, according to GOP dogma, that one particular church should use the power of the state to enforce its religious views on all Americans.

@Mamradpivo Great points. Steering the economy is only an issue at election time, since it ais Congress who holds the actual purse strings.

@saint At the risk of establishing what a financial idiot I am, copy that.,

@CaptainHarley I get that you are a Ron Paul supporter and I know how passionate his accolutes are about the stellar perfection of his extremist ideology. But what in @Linda_Owl‘s perfectly clear and correct statement riled you so much? That, I don’t get.

@Paradox25 There is an old Indian saying to the effect that of this:

You can’t really understand an enemy till you walk a mile in his moccasins. This actually works out well, because in doing that, you may come to understand his viewpoint and win a new friend. And of course, even if you don’t; you are now a mile ahead of him and he has no shoes. :-)

@ETpro, your link doesn’t work. I don’t understand who is saying that being poor helps you better steer the economy. Perhaps there was something in your link that would have explained where you came up with the question.

@ETpro

Lumping Dr. Paul in with the rest of the Republicans. They’re doing everything they can do derail his candidacy.