Yesterday Senator Rick Santorum was allowed to pimp the book someone else wrote under his name, It Takes a Family in a Q&A with Washington Post readers. This question and answer can not go without comment:

DuBois, Pa.: It may take a family, but what do you say to families who need both parents to work in order to make ends meet, and that includes the high cost of child care that makes it even more difficult for parents to survive in this economy?

Senator Rick Santorum: That’s a very important question. I say in the book that it’s important for the government as well as society to be there in order to help moms and dads raise children. One place the government does not help is through taxes. In fact in 1950 the average American family paid 2% in taxes. Today that average American family pays 27% in taxes to the federal government.

Does Santorum really think that taxes are 13.5 times higher than they were in 1950?

You can measure effective tax rate as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities does:

Or average tax burden as Santorum ally Grover Norquist‘s Americans for Tax Reform does:

The Happiness Quotient. 1950s vs. Today. In the “Happy Days” of 1955, the median family paid 27.7 percent of its income in total taxes. By 1995 its total tax burden claimed 38.2 percent of income.

No one’s numbers suggest anything near what Santorum claims. Maybe he’s measuring in Man-on-Dog years.

**Late update: I understand that you can’t exactly fling feces at a sitting U.S. Senator, but John Stewart took a dive last night. If he couldn’t have done any better than that, he should have passed on the booking.