What Would Marco Do? (Gwen Moritz Editor’s Note)

Marco Rubio

Last week, my husband sent me a string of text messages guaranteed to ruin my day:

“Air-conditioning guys are here … Expensive … $2,280 …”

I thought maybe I was being punished because I had, in this space two weeks ago, done some needling of Marco Rubio, the Republican senator from Florida who aspires to manage the world’s largest economic unit despite being unable to manage the economy of his own household. Repairs to his home air-conditioning system were among the reasons Rubio said he needed to withdraw some $68,000 from one of his retirement funds last year.

Some readers, commenting anonymously on our website, took umbrage at my description of Rubio as ignorant, and one (who claimed to be a financial adviser, although that’s hard to believe) suggested that making bad financial decisions didn’t matter as much for someone with Rubio’s future earning potential. (Arkansas Business readers, if you were looking for a new rationalization for your spendthrift ways, there you have it.)

A week later, The New York Times delved much deeper into Rubio’s financial history than my few snarky paragraphs. The Times estimated that Rubio paid $24,000 in taxes and penalties on his retirement fund raid, which is less than the $30,000 I estimated in my column, meaning it merely cost him 35 percent off the top.

The Times is considered a liberal-leaning newspaper, but I noticed Rubio’s campaign disputing only one fact in the 2,300-word story: that the $80,000 fishing boat he bought three years ago was a “luxury” boat, although the maker (Edgewater) uses that word in describing the model Rubio bought.

Instead, turning the negative story into a fundraising opportunity, Rubio told potential donors in an email that The Times was “suggesting that I’m not rich enough to be president!” I would challenge Rubio to support that characterization. The story not only suggested but supported, fact by undisputed fact, that he has earned a lot of money — especially before he chose to leave private law practice for the Senate — and yet has found it impossible to live within his means.

Now, being unable to live within one’s means is not unusual. It’s painfully common, in fact. Supporters have tried to paint Rubio as “just like us” because he had student loans and wanted to give his children a good, Christian education. They don’t point out, naturally, that those things would be easily affordable if he hadn’t had so much money tied up in three houses, cars and a fishing boat. (Rubio recently sold one of the houses for $117,000, $18,000 less than he and a partner bought it for 10 years ago — no money down, of course.)

A lot of people who grow up in modest circumstances — Rubio’s father was a bartender and his mother a hotel maid — are very cautious with the money they later earn. But others, as soon as they get a little jingle, start to believe that they can afford anything and everything and all at the same time. They never get past the monthly payment mentality. It’s obvious which category Rubio fell into. Some people reading these words are in the same category, and you know who you are.

Here’s the thing that sends me into orbit: The people most likely to excuse Marco Rubio’s financial ignorance are the same people who expect perfect financial decisions from people who couldn’t well afford professional financial advice. We expect middle-class Americans — most of whom have no more training in personal finance than Rubio — to take $50,000 or $75,000 a year and make it cover safe housing, nutritious meals, on-time utility payments, reliable transportation and the world’s most expensive health care. We ask them to put 6 or 10 or 15 percent of their salaries in retirement savings (and to invest it wisely) and to save for their children’s college expenses — because education is still the ticket to the kind of income that Marco Rubio can’t make stretch.

I’m happy to report that the Moritzes, a decade older than Rubio but with considerably less income than the quarter-million that Rubio pulls down each year, didn’t have to pay back taxes and penalties just to keep from sweltering in a house that was not designed for cross-ventilation.

But that $2,280 is money that we won’t be able to spend on anything else because, as someone should have explained to Marco Rubio, you can spend money only once. If he hadn’t bought that $80,000 boat, he might not have had to use his retirement money to get his AC working.

Gwen Moritz is editor of Arkansas Business. Email her at GMoritz@ABPG.com.