Daniel Tilson: Marco Rubio’s working class hero con job

Marco Rubio is at it again.

After months of fumbling around trying to boost his bona fides as a foreign policy expert, Florida’s junior U.S. senator pivoted his way out of Thanksgiving weekend seeking credibility on the domestic economic front.

But in writing and speechifying about our ever-worsening American income inequality crisis, Rubio remains incredibly lacking in credibility, and profoundly unworthy of the “working class hero” status he desperately seeks.

In a column for Context Florida this month, Rubio predictably began by invoking the modest middle-class success story of his Cuban immigrant parents. He gave thanks that they “realized the American Dream.”

Then he laid out the problem at hand, the big but:

“But today, there is a growing sense among the people of our city, our state, and our nation that the American Dream is slipping out of their reach… The difficult truth is that if my parents had arrived here in 2006 rather than 1956, they would likely be among those struggling to access opportunity and stay afloat financially.”

True enough, and what a perfect personal platform from which to preach conversion back to some large measure of American economic fairness.

But…no, Rubio is seeking credibility, not solutions.

The question is how does he gain credibility by ignoring the factual lessons of an era when his parents, as he wrote, “were able to find steady jobs that paid livable wages.”

In those years when Republican General Dwight D. Eisenhower was president, the richest of the rich paid a little more than 90 percent of their income in taxes.

Corporations were not allowed to wantonly ship profits and jobs overseas to evade paying taxes and avoid sharing any social responsibility for the “greater good” of a thriving middle class.

Florida and other states further leveled the playing field with estate taxes and intangibles taxes that together did a fine job of avoiding harmful concentration of wealth at the very top.

There was no “Right To Work” law blocking labor union organizing efforts, so more than a third of private sector workers benefited from union representation and collective bargaining for salaries, benefits and workplace rights.

Affordable housing and homeowners’ rights were more important than bank profits and fast-track foreclosures.

Adequately funded public schools and affordable higher education were pathways to upward mobility, rather than targets of tax-evading, profit-making corporate privatization.

Rubio did not mention a single one of those facts, much less compare and contrast them to what has become of economic policy in Florida and America by now.

You can do that part yourself. The Internet makes it awfully easy to ferret out empty rhetoric from plain truth — if you’re more interested in truth than partisan spin.

If you look at what Rubio wrote and then repeated in different words at a big Republican Party of Florida speech last week, you’ll find an almost laughable list of alternate reasons for middle class decline.

There’s the growth of technology, and globalization, and too many regulations…and blah, blah, blah.

Perhaps not surprising when ignoring the actual history of escalating threats to middle class stability, Rubio’s speech offered alternate threats, such as “radical environmentalists who have made millions of dollars on fossil fuels” (Hello Tom Steyers!) and now call for a clean energy economy.

Rubio’s “solutions” make about as much sense, including his written claim that “instead of a counterproductive minimum wage hike, we should institute a wage enhancement credit.”

Rubio continued, “My point is, all of these things are conspiring against the middle class.”

You’d know about that, huh Senator Rubio? 

Daniel Tilson has a Boca Raton-based communications firm called Full Cup Media, specializing in online video and written content for non-profits, political candidates and organizations, and small businesses. Column courtesy of Context Florida.