The State of the Union address is always a reminder of how unique America is. For much of human history, most people were trapped in stagnant societies, where a tiny minority always stayed on top, and no one else even had a chance.
Former Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, a Republican candidate for president, warned [in the fall of 2011] that movement “up into the middle income is actually greater, the mobility in Europe, than it is in America.” National Review, a conservative thought leader, wrote that “most Western European and English-speaking nations have higher rates of mobility.” Even Representative Paul D. Ryan, a Wisconsin Republican who argues that overall mobility remains high, recently wrote that “mobility from the very bottom up” is “where the United States lags behind.”--Jason DeParle, Harder for Americans to Rise From Lower Rungs, NewYork Times, January 4, 2012
Like most Americans, for me this ideal is personal. My parents immigrated here in pursuit of the opportunity to improve their life and give their children the chance at an even better one. They made it to the middle class, my dad working as a bartender and my mother as a cashier and a maid. I didn't inherit any money from them. But I inherited something far better – the real opportunity to accomplish my dreams.
During his rise to political prominence, Sen. Marco Rubio frequently repeated a compelling version of his family’s history that had special resonance in South Florida. He was the “son of exiles,” he told audiences, Cuban Americans forced off their beloved island after “a thug,” Fidel Castro, took power.
But a review of documents — including naturalization papers and other official records — reveals that the Florida Republican’s account embellishes the facts. The documents show that Rubio’s parents came to the United States and were admitted for permanent residence more than two-and-a-half years before Castro’s forces overthrew the Cuban government and took power on New Year’s Day 1959.
The supposed flight of Rubio’s parents has been at the core of the young senator’s political identity, both before and after his stunning tea-party-propelled victory in last year’s Senate election. Rubio — now considered a prospective 2012 Republican vice presidential candidate and a possible future presidential contender — mentions his parents in the second sentence of the official biography on his Senate Web site. It says that Mario and Oriales Rubio “came to America following Fidel Castro’s takeover.”-- Manuel Roig-Franzia, Marco Rubio’s compelling family story embellishes facts, documents show, Washington Post, October 20, 2011
Presidents in both parties – from John F. Kennedy to Ronald Reagan – have known that our free enterprise economy is the source of our middle class prosperity.
The American dream has never been the rags-to-riches fable of the Horatio Alger stories. But there once was a real American dream, and it went like this: If you work hard, your income will rise consistently and will enable you and your family to have a decent life, a good life—even a secure life.Rubio's supposed working class background and inexpensive house was more B.S.
No more. For at least half of all Americans—those on the bottom rungs of the economic ladder—that dream has been dead for more than thirty years. Their household incomes have hardly risen since the glory decades after World War II. In many cases, their incomes have actually fallen. The only protection these Americans have had from a complete collapse in their standard of living has been government social programs.
This bears repeating: the only reason incomes for the lower half have risen more than marginally since the 1970s is that such federal programs as Social Security, unemployment insurance, the earned-income tax credit, and food stamps have provided support. “Without America’s net of social programs,” political scientist Lane Kenworthy argues, “income inequality would be much worse than it already is.”--Jeff Madrick, Half Empty, Harper's, December 2012
For more information, read Paul Krugman's Rubio and the Zombies.
P.S. I couldn't care less that he had to drink a glass of water to finish his speech. It was the content of Rubio's speech that was really ridiculous.
