Free Blue Collar Conservatives: Recommitting to an America That Works by Rick Santorum

they can—summer trips to the lake, dinners out, gym memberships, and contributions to their retirement plans. There’s nothing set aside for the boys’ college, and the idea of ever retiring seems like a joke.
    The once-proud factory town where the Harrisons live is littered with home foreclosures. Financial stress has weakened marriages, and many families are falling apart. Socialproblems that James and Susan hardly knew about when they were growing up—drug abuse, domestic violence, out-of-wedlock pregnancy—are commonplace now.

    The factory towns in western Pennsylvania that I represented in Congress in the early 1990s were filled with thousands of families like the Harrisons. Those people have been forced into lower-paying service jobs, or they have to make the long commute to Pittsburgh for work.
    Nearly nine million jobs have been lost since the beginning of the Great Recession. 1 For some, it seems like American economic decline is the inevitable new reality that we’ll have to get used to. I don’t believe it. When I was in Congress, I was told that the jobs Pennsylvania had lost weren’t coming back. And guess what—that was wrong. Yes, Pittsburgh’s mills are gone, but their places have been taken by office parks, high-tech manufacturers, and, of course, Walmarts, Cinemark Theatres, and Home Depots. The report of Pittsburgh’s death was an exaggeration. But what about the little towns built around one factory, or the rural areas that lived on mining or timber? In the small cities and towns of the Rust Belt, people had started to accept the inevitability of decline, but something has happened to change that. Now many rural areas are witnessing growth, and it is spreading to the cities. What happened?
    That boom is coming from oil and gas development, made possible by hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”), which releases oil and natural gas from shale rock formations. It turns out that the United States is the Saudi Arabia of shale rock. Fracking has filled North Dakota with good-paying jobs and reduced the state’s unemployment rate to 2.6 percent. 2 North Dakota shouldn’t be alone. There are substantial deposits of shale oil and gas in the Rust Belt states of West Virginia, New York, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. Even President Obama has acknowledged that there is probably enough American natural gas, in deposits such as Pennsylvania’s Marcellus Shale formation, to last us a hundred years. 3
    On the campaign trail in 2012, I met Dick Holcombe from rural Sullivan County in northeastern Pennsylvania, which is ground zero for Pennsylvania’s shale gas boom. After traveling the world for his career in business, Dick returned home to Sullivan County to start an e-commerce services company. It has been successful and is now the largest private employer in the county. Dick could have gone anywhere, but two things drew him back home—caring for his aging parents and shale. He understood the potential of the fracking revolution for the region. As he puts it, he wanted to see what happens when a fifth-generation dairy farmer becomes a millionaire overnight. He got back to Sullivan County just in time—there have been plenty of millionaire dairy farmers to observe.
    Many families he knew growing up, particularly the dairy farmers and small-mine operators, were land rich but cash poor. Families that had been scraping by for generations are now millionaires because of gas leases, and land values have risen beyond anyone’s expectations. Fortunately, the values that saw these families through the tough times when manufacturing and farming were in decline are guiding them through the boom times now. Prudence and a sense of perspective are critical for families who have in effect won the lottery because of a gas lease.
    Aside from the increased traffic on the county’s scenic roads, not much has changed. Many dairymen are still farming. The small coal operators are still mining and finding additional uses