Fresh off their groundbreaking story from last week, demonstrating that Marco Rubio, who is 44 years old, has a grand total four tickets on his driving record (two of those aren’t even for any actual driving), the New York Times has once again dipped into the store of documents no doubt provided to them by “unbiased” journalist and Hillary mouthpiece David Brock, to discover that Marco Rubio bought real estate, paid off his student loans, and wrote a book on his upbringing which netted him a hefty sum, some of which he splurged on a boat.
I, for one, am horrified and I’m sure you are, too.
For years, Senator Marco Rubio struggled under the weight of student debt, mortgages and an extra loan against the value of his home totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars. But in 2012, financial salvation seemed to have arrived: A publisher paid him $800,000 to write a book about growing up as the son of Cuban immigrants.
In speeches, Mr. Rubio, a Florida Republican, spoke of his prudent plan for using the cash to finally pay off his law school loans, expressing relief that he no longer owed “a lady named Sallie Mae,” as he once called the lender.
But at the same time, he splurged on an extravagant purchase: $80,000 for a luxury speedboat, state records show. At the time, Mr. Rubio confided to a friend that it was a potentially inadvisable outlay that he could not resist. The 24-foot boat, he said, fulfilled a dream.
Disgusted at his absolutely egregious financial errors? Willing to turn your horrified eyes away from the millions that were funneled through the Clinton Foundation to enrich the Democrats’ preferred septuagenarian’s husband’s private stores whilst unnaturally influencing America’s foreign policy? I thought so.
Actually, even these first three paragraphs are misleading, because they don’t specifically address the Rubios’ financial timeline, assuming that they acquired and spent money all at once, rather than over the course of their lives. Like many people, including myself, a young Marco Rubio inadvisably acquired a legal degree, which ran his student debt — a long term debt — into the six figures. He also racked up some credit card debt and bought a house, which can often make you cash poor, but is a good long-term investment nonetheless. Sure, he seems to have struggled for a short time to pay the bills, even with a substantial salary, but by the time Rubio was ready for a statewide race just a few short years ago, his finances had evened out, and thanks to a great book about his upbringing that came with a hefty paycheck, he was able to stabilize, set up college funds for his kids, and then splurge on the boat.
Yes, Rubio was rescued by an unlikely source that most of us don’t have access to — a book deal — but he is hardly the first person in public office to pay off a six-figure student loan with a lucrative writing gig. The Obamas, whose real estate dealings with convicted criminal and Chicago businessman Tony Rezko somehow went unnoticed by the Times, also paid off most of their liabilities when Barack Obama published his first of several memoirs, and not until 2004.
Thankfully, though, the Times has its own financial expert to assess the Rubios finances and find their strategies wanting. According to Harold Evensky, who is, according to the Times, a “longtime financial expert,” Rubio took on too much debt too quickly (even though his debt-to-income ratio was never more than around 40%). The Times neglects to mention, of course that Evensky is a Democratic donor, who has been a fan of Barack Obama, someone Rubio isn’t himself a policy fan of, since 2007 (just three years after the Obama’s became financially solvent). Evensky is an expert on retirement savings, but failed to use his expertise to, say, assess whether the Rubio’s liquidating part of a retirement account to buy a fridge — another groundbreaking scoop from a few weeks ago — was a similarly egregious mistake.
I suppose the good news for Rubio is that the Clinton machine thinks he’s a real threat, something many Republicans are still on the fence about. American Bridge is, it seems, clearly pouring a lot of effort into digging up dirt on him and manipulating it in a way that makes him sound like more of a monster than a woman who promotes “women’s rights” as a cornerstone issue while cashing checks from countries that don’t let women drive. Like I said, I, for one, am horrified.
And I can’t wait until they dig up a story about Rubio’s suspicious string of dead goldfish. I bet that will be fascinating.
