I could not agree more with this column by Rebecca Hagelin at The Washington Times.

The media is hiding the fact that Rick is a champion of economic freedom – and that he understands better than any other candidate the root cause of poverty in America and our ever growing nanny-state. Little-known is the fact that he has the experience learned in the school of hard knocks in Congress and the Senate to know how to push through his bold economic agenda for our future.

A major case in point: Few in the media will remind America that it was Rick Santorum who championed the Welfare Reform Act, which successfully overhauled welfare and helped millions of Americans transition from poverty to the workforce.

Rick knows that the number one cause of poverty in America is broken and fatherless families. Children from single-parent homes are nearly six times as likely to live in poverty as children raised by both a mother and father – yet Rick Santorum is the only candidate with the understanding and guts to address the issue head on.

Rick is right. It’s BECAUSE I’m a single mom that I am in poverty, and it was my divorce that caused me to be a single mom. But Hagelin misses something in the article. That is NOT the whole story about Rick’s plan. I am a social conservative, and a mom in poverty who does not want to get on the government dole, but what I see in Rick’s “Made in America” plan is HOPE for an economy that will ensure that I won’t have to!

See also, Rick’s First 100 Days: Economic Freedom Agenda

Both Barack Obama AND Mitt Romney seem to believe they are helping me by making sure that someone like me, an “under-educated” (by some standards) disabled person, can go down to the social services office and sign up for food stamps and government programs. I DON’T WANT THAT. I want a GROWING ECONOMY so that there is more cash flowing into my tip jar and/or more job opportunities for me LOCALLY here in rural America! Rick’s program addresses the problem of small-town America drying up. He addresses it with his zero rate on manufacturing.

America’s small towns are drying up due to loss of manufacturing to other countries. My town used to have four — FOUR — sewing factories. That is, factories that make apparel.  Now we don’t have any sewing factories. I am guessing that each of those factories employed 100-200 people, mostly women who really needed those kinds of jobs. They were jobs that women could do very well and that did not require any kind of higher education. Some of us don’t want to become doctors and lawyers and parole officers. Some of us want the kinds of factory jobs where we can just punch a clock, put in eight hours, put in a good day’s work but without having to get higher education, because we need the income to help support our struggling families and we want to be home with our families as much as possible. Men, too, are struggling to find jobs in rural America and in small towns. We need more factories! Rick knows this and he wants  to help us with the zero rate on manufacturing.

We don’t need a candidate who simply professes the religion of the right that capitalism is king. We need a candidate who understands the plight of people like me who can never seem to get ahead in life. Brad Plumer wrote at The Washington Post that Rick Santorum understands the importance of income mobility, that is the importance of making sure that in America, a father (or mother) may actually have reason to hope that his son will actually have a better life than he did.

Rick is cast as a candidate who is “too religious” but I see that BOTH candidates — Romney and Santorum — stand on a platform that is either moral or immoral. I do not see the religion of capitalism professed by Mitt Romney to be an appealing message. I see in Rick Santorum a man who is not afraid to profess his personal Christian beliefs and whose Christianity means that the growing economy of America should INCLUDE PEOPLE LIKE ME.

Unfortunately, those who profess the religion of capitalism are opposed to the idea of giving a zero percent tax rate to one sector of the economy. They are BLIND to the fact that McDonald’s and Wal-Mart and Walgreens will not pull up stakes and move all of their operations overseas but FACTORIES DO. The manufacturing sector needs to be competitive with other countries, and just as charities should not have to pay taxes to the government, neither should economic sectors that pay taxes that reduce their ability to be competitive with other countries, because a vibrant economy for America is a MORAL ISSUE.

That’s my take on it, and it’s why I put my economic hopes into the Santorum candidacy, not the Romney candidacy.

Rick Santorum gives me a reason to believe that things are actually going to get better if he is president. His message does that for a lot of people, and it’s why he’s won so many votes despite being caricatured in the media as the “religious” candidate.

Everybody needs a reason to believe that things are going to get better.