• Marco Rubio, American Dreams: Restoring Economic Opportunity for Everyone, Sentinel, 2014, 212 pages, $27.95.
At the outset of American Dreams, Marco Rubio pays tribute to his grandfather, Pedro Victor Garcia, but he’s clearly looking ahead to 2016 and the prospects of a Hillary Clinton presidency. In his view, she has “proven herself wedded to the policies and programs of the past” and her presidency “will be about spending more money on a broken system” and “raising taxes to pay for government.” In fact, according to the Republican U.S. senator from Florida, the election of Hillary Clinton “would be nothing more than a third Obama term,” and Rubio cites primary sources.
According to both, those who work hard and achieve success should not be proud of themselves but thankful to government. “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that,” said President Obama. And as Hillary echoes, “Don’t let anyone tell you it’s businesses and corporations that create jobs.” Both believe that government knows best on education, health care, and the economy, now in sad shape due to what Rubio calls “command-and-control liberalism.”
Taking a cue from Ronald Reagan, Rubio asks readers, “Are you better off than you were five years ago?” and he supplies the answer: “By every measure Americans [are] worse off today than before Obama took office.” So Rubio sees a defining moment for conservatives, who must “step forward with our own solution and not simply rail against the expansion of the state.” And Rubio outlines his solution in some detail.
He wants to lower the corporate tax rate, now the “highest of any advanced economy in the world” at nearly 40 percent, and as he sees it an impediment to investment. He would trim the “hidden tax” of federal regulation, estimated by some as more than 60 percent higher than the unhidden kind of tax.
Rubio would eliminate the payroll tax on workers when they reach retirement age, which he says would have little or no effect on Social Security revenues. And he wants to “make it easier for American workers to save more and work longer.” The Florida senator stresses the importance of family, decrying the tax code that penalizes marriage by saddling couples with taxes more onerous than would face two otherwise identical singles. He would “allow parents to keep more of their own money and make their own choices, rather than have government spend more of our own money and make choices for us.” The senator wants two tax brackets instead of seven and a $2,500 tax credit for each child under 16.
Rubio sees Obamacare, including its bailout for insurance companies, as “the single largest impediment to job creation.” He would convert the tax preference for employer sponsored health care into a tax credit for individual Americans.
The Florida Republican criticizes New York Mayor Bill De Blasio for declaring “open season” on charter schools and Obama for curtailing the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program. Rubio supports “empowering parents with more choices,” but readers of American Dreams do not get the impression that the author sees school choice as the civil rights issue of our time.
Marco Rubio, son of Cuban immigrants, wants to move away from a family-based immigration system toward a merit and skill-based approach, with a guest worker plan for seasonal agricultural workers. Amnesty for 12 million illegal immigrants he calls “unrealistic and quite frankly irresponsible.” In Rubio’s plan, criminals and those of short duration in the country would have to leave. Other illegals would have to come forward, register, apply for a temporary visa, and remain ineligible for welfare while maintaining status as a temporary resident for a decade. Then they could apply for permanent residency “the way anyone else would.”
American Dreams covers little on foreign policy, but Rubio puts plenty of distance between himself and the Obama-Clinton squad. Rubio decries “the State Department cover-up of Benghazi,” but does not set forth a detailed plan to deal with what French Prime Minister Manuel Valls calls “radical Islam.” More recently, when Obama announced plans to begin normalizing relations with Cuba, Rubio called the administration’s foreign policy “not just naive, but willfully ignorant of the way the world truly works.”
Rubio remains more comfortable on the domestic front, while seeing some troubling trends on his own side. “Some conservatives,” he writes, “want to keep the ideas of yesterday and just spend less on them, as if programs that aren’t working will somehow be made to function if only their budgets are cut.” That assumes “some conservatives” want to leave all these programs in place. Rubio tags 92 overlapping and duplicative federal programs that spent $15 billion in the “War on Poverty,” by his count $799 billion in 2012 alone. But American Dreams is short on specifics of what federal programs and agencies should be eliminated at the earliest convenience.
Obama, a rigid leftist whom Rubio kindly calls an “old-fashioned big government liberal,” has created new entitlements and federal agencies during a time of recession. Rubio doubtless is right that a Hillary Clinton presidency would be an Obama third term and “a death blow to the American dream,” in terms of economic opportunity, but such an “old ideas” presidency may be more likely than the kind Sen. Rubio wants. And it may be another American dream that his plan could be achieved without deep and permanent reductions in the size of government. Readers of American Dreams might recall that even Ronald Reagan failed to eliminate the federal Department of Education, a payoff to teacher unions for their support of Jimmy Carter in 1976.
Lloyd Billingsley is a contributor to Carolina Journal.