Here are some key figures from Wednesday night’s prime-time Republican debate: $4.5bn. $59m. $26m. $22m. $10m. $3.5m. $2m. They’re the estimates of the net worth of seven of the eight Republican candidates who joined the debate in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, representing the wealth accumulated by (respectively) Donald Trump, Carly Fiorina, Ben Carson, Jeb Bush, John Kasich, Ted Cruz and Rand Paul.
Missing from that list, and the definite outlier in the crowd, is Marco Rubio. Depending on how you calculate the number, his net worth is only between $100,000 and $443,000. And yet there seems to be widespread agreement that his standing among the pack of presidential hopefuls is rising; almost as many respondents in one poll called him the winner of Wednesday’s debate as described Trump as the victor.
Given Rubio’s – relative – poverty, his push to the forefront is intriguing. While nearly all of the candidates talked about the little guy, and paid lip service to the importance of the middle class, it’s only Rubio who, with a straight face, can still claim to experience some of what they go through on a routine basis. As recently as 2011, for instance, at the age of 40 and with children of his own, the Florida senator was still struggling with $100,000 in student debt, acquired from both his undergraduate and his law school studies. Only the publication of his book, An American Son, enabled him finally to pay off the balance of those loans. Even so, his net worth was still negative as recently as 2012.
Like a lot of Americans, he has struggled to manage his own finances, probably largely without assistance or advice because neither his net worth nor his income would have been large enough for him to have found it easy to hire a financial adviser. His parents – his father was a bartender, his mother was a maid who worked in a hotel – never had any money to manage. That meant that in the home, the first place that someone learns crucial lessons about being wise with money, the issues were probably confined to how to stretch a dollar to cover as much as possible, not how to use credit, how to accumulate savings or how to approach more sophisticated financial decisions. And as a nation, we’re still pretty bad about teaching financial literacy in schools – though at least the picture is improving.
Whether out of carelessness, laziness, ignorance or simply because he was overwhelmed by the magnitude of the financial hurdles ahead of him, Rubio made a lot of foolish financial decisions. With all that student debt still hanging over his head, he treated himself by splashing out on a new $80,000 luxury speedboat. He made one of the poorest financial decisions possible when hecashed out a $68,000 retirement plan in order to pay for a new fridge, repair his air conditioning, and cover some school expenses. Not only is that money not quietly sitting aside and accumulating, tax free – a big loss for his future, since every dollar he can save from here on out will never be able to match what those dollars could have earned for him, due to the way compound interest works – but he probably lost at least a third of that amount in taxes and penalties.
Earlier this year, he sold a Tallahassee investment property that he jointly owned at a loss after narrowly avoiding foreclosure, having failed to make the mortgage payments on the house for five months.
Then there is Rubio’s haphazard use of credit cards. His apparent willingness to intermingle personal and party funds (at least in the short term; Rubio has said he settled all those outstanding personal charges promptly, and that many of them were errors on his part when he pulled the wrong card out of his wallet) has caused a kerfuffle that seems unlikely to die down. Overall, it appears that of $182,000 charges on a Republican party American Express card over the course of four years, 73 items, totaling $22,000, were for personal items, ranging from flowers to a hotel bill.
The plus side? It would be hard indeed for the average American not to relate to this, from Rubio’s struggle to finance a college education to his foolhardy decision to liquidate that IRA account to cover routine expenses. And it’s certainly a hell of a lot easier to understand Rubio’s missteps than to relate to Donald Trump’s finances: the son of a successful real estate developer, Trump has claimed that by the time he himself graduated from college and joined his father’s firm, he had a net worth of $200,000 in 1968 dollars, more than Rubio does in 2015 dollars. An American might wish he had the good luck to be born into a family like Trump’s, but is well aware that the odds make it more likely his family circumstances will be more like Rubio’s. And there’s a fairly decent chance that middle-class voters will find Trump’s easy ability to write off debt via no fewer than four corporate bankruptcies of firms bearing his name in the last 25 years as troubling, in a different way, as some of Rubio’s missteps, given the difficulties they’ve had simply renegotiating their own mortgages in the aftermath of the financial crisis.
Republican candidates would be foolish to underestimate how important it is to middle-class voters – even those who aspire to be as wealthy as Trump or Fiorina – to show that they not only think about the voters’ issues but have lived their lives. A key moment in George HW Bush’s (failed) re-election campaign in 1992 came when the president was visibly startled by the electronic scanners available in supermarkets – scanners that had been in place for years. It came to symbolize the extent to which he was out of touch with the lives and concerns of ordinary Americans, and trapped inside an elite existence. Similarly, the 2012 Republican presidential candidate, Mitt Romney, may have doomed his chances at the polls not only by being extremely wealthy but when his wife let slip that they wouldn’t need to take so many vacations outside the country because, you know, they had so many housesin the United States for that purpose.
The question of relatability is one on which Rubio wins and his rivals fall short, to varying degrees. Of course, Rubio also has a big achilles heel: he isn’t a plucky striver who has budgeted carefully and made no mistakes. He’s been like the rest of us – only on a larger scale. He has made some of the same mistakes many of us have made, like being tempted to spend on a vacation or other large purchase when we’ve still got student debt payments to make, or yanking money out of a retirement account. And he’s had the chutzpah to think that this doesn’t disqualify him from seeking the office of president – so it’s safe to say that any remaining velvet gloves with respect to Rubio’s personal finances are likely to be whipped off in the coming weeks.
While his rivals rehash past mistakes, I’d rather look at whether he understands where he went wrong and whether he did anything right. (Yup: he used that book advance to pay off his student loans, and he is already setting money aside in college savings plans for his children.) The next question isn’t about what happened in the past, but about how Rubio proposes to handle the country’s finances and what policies he’d suggest to help other families out there. And here the track record is mixed.
Some individual ideas are intriguing. Rubio has suggested what he calls a“Student Investment Plan”, which would see a company sponsor a student’s education in return for a percentage of their salary for a given number of years: it sounds a lot like a corporate sector version of the military plan that sends veterans to college free after their tour of duty, only without the students having to sign up to risk their lives. His tax and spending plans don’t make all that much sense, alas: if he tries to balance the budget while implementing what he has proposed, the results will be devastating for precisely those groups he has claimed to worry most about, such as working-class families and single mothers.
Ultimately, perhaps Rubio’s major legacy in this campaign will be as a kind of great personal finance lesson in what not to do with your money, whether or not you intend to run for president one day – and a spur to greater and more effective financial literacy education at all levels, nationwide. While I wish his policies reflected his background and those experiences, it’s still marginally reassuring to see that it’s at least theoretically possible to make it into the final rounds of this Republican contest and not be a millionaire. Because – lest the Republican candidates forget – should one of them win the whole shebang, and become the nation’s CEO, their job isn’t going to be to hang out with the rich and powerful. It will be to represent and be accountable to the rest of us: from the poorest of the working poor, holding down three jobs to make ends meet, to the laid-off middle manager, to the single parent wondering how to send kids to college. Our worries were Rubio’s worries; our worries should be the worries of anyone who aspires to the presidency.
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