With Rick Santorum poised to do well in Iowa today and perhaps play at least a barely-plausible role as an anti-Romney challenger for the GOP nomination, it’s worth looking for a moment at his priorities.

Santorum’s tax policy would probably cause less inequality than his rivals. He wouldn’t eliminate the capital gains tax, only reduce it, for example. He would cut the corporate tax rate in half but no further. He would include a flat tax, but the top marginal tax rate would be a relatively high 28% for this crowd. And Santorum, would probably leave the working class and the poor better off than almost any other GOP challenger, on one condition: that they have a large family. No wonder the Duggars endorsed him!

Santorum would triple the child tax credit and reduce the so-called “marriage penalty,” which slightly increases taxes for middle to upper-middle class married couples over two individuals filing separately. Paradoxically, reducing the marriage penalty would encourage families to have two incomes outside the home, rather than a 50s-style “nuclear family,” currently subsidized in the tax code, where one breadwinner earns money and the other stays home to raise children. So Santorum’s tax policy would actually discourage such a Leave it to Beaver scenario, but the increase on the child tax credit would encourage bigger families.

To help that along even further, Santorum would helpfully allow states to ban birth control, making it harder to avoid having lots of kids, and therefore increasing eligibility for multiple rounds of the child tax credit. See, Santorum just wants you to be forced into childbirth so you can keep more of your money!

Rick Santorum reiterated his belief that states should have the right to outlaw contraception during an interview with ABC News yesterday, saying, “The state has a right to do that, I have never questioned that the state has a right to do that. It is not a constitutional right, the state has the right to pass whatever statues they have.”

Santorum has long opposed the Supreme Court’s 1965 ruling “that invalidated a Connecticut law banning contraception” and has also pledged to completely defund federal funding for contraception if elected president. As he told CaffeinatedThoughts.com editor Shane Vander Hart in October, “One of the things I will talk about, that no president has talked about before, is I think the dangers of contraception in this country,” the former Pennsylvania senator explained. “It’s not okay. It’s a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.”

There is at least some honesty here from Santorum, that his anti-woman policies are really about sexual control, rather than some concern for the fetus. I don’t know that taking away condoms is the most popular policy position in 21st-century America, but at least he doesn’t sugarcoat the issue. Plus, the promise of all those thousand-dollar bills babies at the end of the equation could make the policy more attractive!

Just to be clear, Santorum doesn’t have a snowball’s chance, in my view, of becoming President. It’s a sad commentary that his sexually preoccupied, forced-birth policy prescriptions are weirdly more compassionate than the rest of the GOP field.