Rick Santorum is an Idiot

Rick Santorum was senator of a state that has lost a lot of old-line heavy manufacturing jobs as America's comparative advantage has shifted away from those 19th century leaders. It's tough on a lot of Pennsylvania towns, so Santorum knows a lot about this.

And he has a plan.

Hopefully, nobody heard it. But if I understand it correctly, from tonight's debate, he wants to put zero taxes on manufacturing and zero taxes on overseas profits. So we're going to give you a huge incentive to bring jobs back to the U.S.... and a huge incentive to keep them overseas. And it's going to be paid for by all the businesses that are actually doing well despite the economy, the high corporate taxes, global competition, etc.

This is like something from Atlas Shrugged: let's tax the successful so that the unsuccessful can continue in their dysfunction.

No hard feelings to Pennsylvania, steel workers, or anybody, but: those jobs aren't coming back. You can't distort your way out of the 21st century, and a stable American economy will be built on people doing things better than anyone else in the world - and exporting it - rather than by people doing what they did best 50 and 150 years ago and complaining that the world has passed them.

The former senator continues to combine all of the worst aspects of Republicanism into a complete package of shrill, nativist, pro-war, anti-business, anti-gay, anti-technology poopstorm of incontinence incompetence.