American Dreams

SENTINEL

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First published by Sentinel, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, 2015

Copyright © 2015 by Marco A. Rubio

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Rubio, Marco, 1971-

American dreams: restoring economic opportunity for everyone / Marco Rubio.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-698-17636-2

1. United States—Economic policy—2009- 2. United States—Economic conditions—2009- 3. United States—Social policy—2009- 4. United States—Politics and government—2009- 5. Middle class—United States. I. Title.

HC106.84.R83 2015

330.973—dc23 2014038671

To the American Dream and all who are pursuing it.

 

M
y grandfather Pedro Víctor García was born in rural Cuba in the last year of the nineteenth century. He was stricken with polio at a young age, which left him permanently disabled. Since he was unable to work on the family farm, his parents sent him away to school because it was the only way he would ever have a chance to support himself when he grew up. He learned to read and write quite well, a skill that got him hired as a lector, reading newspapers and novels to workers at a cigar factory. He also learned to be a telegraph operator, a skill that would one day land him a job with a railroad company.

In time, though, he lost his job at the railroad to a politically connected coworker. After that, he struggled to provide for his seven daughters. My mother remembers how he spent all day looking for odd jobs—not easy for a disabled man in a developing country. He would return home in the evenings with bleeding cuts and scrapes on his legs because his limp had caused him to slip and fall throughout the day. Ultimately, he ended up repairing shoes in Havana before coming to America.

Papá, as we called him, lived with us for most of the first thirteen years of my life. Every day he would put on a suit and tie and sit outside on a folding aluminum lawn chair to smoke one of his three daily cigars. I spent hours sitting with him, listening to him share his stories about history, politics and baseball. I could always count on him to feed my curiosity about history, ranging from World War II to Cuban independence. Looking back now, I realize that the greatest impact Papá had on me was a simple and powerful lesson embedded in all of our talks.

When he was young, he had big dreams and ambitions for himself. He had an interest in politics and world affairs, as well as the gift of communication. He wanted to put those talents to use as a leader of industry or state. But he was disabled. He wasn't politically connected. And his family had no wealth. So, as with most people in the world, his future was determined more by the circumstances of his birth than by his dreams or his ability.

Papá wanted me to know that my life could be different. Unlike him, I would have the chance to go as far as my talent and my work would take me. I was a citizen of the one place on earth where even the son of a bartender and a maid could grow up to achieve any dream. I was an American.

It is easy for those of us who were born and have lived our entire lives in the United States to fail to appreciate how unique our country is. But people like my grandfather knew. And if we listen, they remind us of something important.

Over two centuries ago, a nation was founded on the belief that all people had a God-given right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. From then on, the world would never be the same again. Our founders put in place a republic and a free-enterprise economy designed to promote and protect this God-given right. And the result was the single greatest nation in all of human history.

Papá split his time between Miami and Las Vegas, where we lived for a few years during my childhood. By the summer of 1984, he knew he was nearing the end of his life, so he decided to cut his time in Miami short and come home to us. In August, he fell and broke his hip. My mother asked me to ride in the ambulance with him to the hospital so I could help him communicate with the paramedics. I remember standing in the hallway outside the X-ray room and hearing him groan in pain as they tried to take X-rays of his broken hip. And I remember standing by his bedside the next day as he began to slip into a coma in the last hours of his life.

As he slipped away, I held his hand and I made him a promise: I was going to study. I was going to make something of myself. I would not waste the opportunity I had to achieve my dreams. And he squeezed my hand as if to let me know he was at peace.

Every day since that day I have worked to make good on my promise to my grandfather. Like everyone, I've made mistakes and I've fallen short. But, thanks to him, to my parents, and to the promise of the country they adopted as their own, I have been able to realize his dream for me. I have a wife and family that I love. I am privileged to represent the people of Florida in the U.S. Senate. My life is blessed.

What bothers me most about my country today is that there are Americans like me—Americans who have worked hard and tried to do the right things to get ahead—but whose lives aren't so blessed. Jennifer, a young woman in her twenties who lives in Miami, is such an American, an heir to the American Dream just as I am. But her life has not worked out as planned—at least not so far. She has done everything right. She has played by the rules. But she hasn't achieved her American Dream. She's starting to doubt she ever will.

When Jennifer was growing up, her father always told her that an education was the key to a life better than his own. She took him at his word, worked hard and went to Florida International University. Four years ago, she graduated with a degree in public administration. She was the first in her family to go to college. Despite having paid for what she thought was the ticket to a better life, Jennifer has begun to wonder whether college was a waste of her time and money. The only job she can find has nothing to do with her degree. Her salary is barely enough to cover her monthly bills, let alone put anything aside to save for a house of her own. To make matters worse, her father recently got laid off. And because she doesn't make enough to help him out, they've had to do what too many other Americans have had to do: form a “multigenerational housing unit.” In other words, they've moved in with Jennifer's grandmother.

A generation ago, Jennifer's current wage might have been enough for her to reach the middle class. But today, her monthly expenses are prohibitive: $300 for her car payment, $200 for car insurance, $200 for gas, $200 for food, $100 for her cell phone bill—just to name a few. She'd like to go back to school to earn a graduate degree, but she doesn't want the $50,000 in debt she would incur. She has none of the confidence, held by earlier generations of Americans, that investing in herself through education will pay off in the job market.

Like me, Jennifer grew up in a country that has always prided itself on offering an equal opportunity for its people to get ahead—not a guarantee of equal success, but of an equal opportunity to go as far as your hard work and your wits can take you. People everywhere dream of better lives for themselves and for their children, of course. Yet for the vast majority of humanity, and for the vast majority of history, this simply wasn't possible. As my grandfather never let me forget, though, it is different in America. Here, so many people from humble or disadvantaged backgrounds have achieved their ambitions that this universal hope has been given a name. It has come to be known as the American Dream.

The American Dream still lives. But it is slipping further and further out of reach of millions of Americans, and this is the central challenge of our time. How we respond to this challenge—and whether we are successful—will determine whether we continue to be an exceptional nation.

For conservatives especially, this is a defining moment. The failure of government-centered, command-and-control liberalism to lift the poor and sustain the middle class is apparent as never before. Whether we are able to step forward with our own solutions—and not simply rail against the expansion of the state—will determine our future as a movement.

Our recent history in this regard is not encouraging. President Barack Obama was elected on a promise to fight for poor and middle-class Americans like Jennifer. During his campaigns for president, he talked directly to the American people about the girl who's worried she can't go to college because she can't afford it, about the dad who doesn't know if his wages will cover the winter heating bill, about the single mom who's stressed about what her children are doing after school while she's at work. Meanwhile, my party talked about tax cuts and waited for the American people to punish the president for the economy. They didn't. He won. We lost.

And yet seven years into his presidency, struggling Americans are—by every measure—worse off today than they were before he took office. Why has a president elected as a champion of the disadvantaged failed so miserably at helping them? Because, like most liberals, he doesn't understand the real causes of the erosion of equal opportunity we are experiencing today. He has raised taxes, increased regulations and taken over health care—all according to the outdated liberal theory that Americans struggle when government doesn't tax the rich enough and spend on the poor enough. But the results, such as they are, speak for themselves. After seven years of old-school liberalism, fewer Americans are working than at any time since Jimmy Carter, new business creation is 30 percent lower than it was in the 1980s and the economy shrank by the highest rate since the Great Recession in the first quarter of 2014.

It's getting harder for millions of Americans to get ahead, not because our taxes are too low or our government is too stingy. The poor and the middle class are struggling because while our economy is undergoing a dramatic and disruptive transformation, our policies have not changed with it. Our economy is no longer producing enough well-paying jobs, not enough people have the skills they need for better-paying jobs and the values needed for success are eroding at an alarming rate.

The rise of dozens of developed economies means we have more competition for jobs than ever before. Yet our tax code makes it more expensive to invest in America in comparison to our competition. Rapid advances in technology and the globalization of the economy have meant that many of the jobs that once made the American Dream possible are now being outsourced or automated. Overall, our regulations are causing us to lose our advantage in innovation.

Many of our low-skill jobs once paid enough to make it to the middle class. But now many of them pay wages that have not kept up with the cost of living. Today's better-paying jobs require higher education or skills training, but we have an outdated, expensive, inaccessible education system that fails to graduate students with skills that prepare them for work. Older students who have to work full-time and raise a family struggle to access a higher education system that wasn't built for them. And a college education has become more expensive than ever, leaving millions of young Americans with massive student loans.

Underlying these economic changes are societal ones. To succeed in life, you don't just need skills and a good job. You need to have values like hard work, discipline and self-control. No one is born with these values. They have to be taught by families and faith. But today, we face a serious erosion of family life in America. Millions of children are growing up in unstable homes in which they are not taught the values necessary for personal and economic success.

The result is a pervasive—and growing—sense of insecurity. Instead of adjusting to the realities of the new era, however, our leaders are doubling down on policies and institutions designed in the middle of the last century. Our taxes, our schools, our regulations, our immigration system and our poverty and retirement programs—they're all relics of the last century. They were conceived and created at a time when America faced limited international competition, at a time when, even with no formal education, you could find a low-skill job that paid a middle-class wage. But this is not the world we live in anymore.

Failing to adjust to the realities of a new era is a recurring theme in history. We don't want to be the generals who are busy fighting the last war. During World War II, the U.S. Army's last chief of the cavalry, Major General John Herr, was asked to develop a plan to confront and defeat the German Panzers. He concluded that the cavalry horses were failing to stop the German tanks because they were too tired after a long journey to the front. Herr's brilliant insight was to use tractor trailers to move the horses closer to the battlefield so they would be better rested and thus able to defeat the Panzers. Fortunately for America and the world, General George Marshall's response to this plan was to retire General Herr, get rid of the horses and reorganize the army.

General Herr's kind of thinking is exactly what is wrong with our politics today. Liberals want to spend more money on the ideas of yesterday. Some conservatives 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. But neither of these approaches will ever work. No matter how much we spent on those horses or how efficient we made them, they were never going to stop those tanks. And no matter how much we spend on the ideas of the last century, or how much we streamline some of them, they are never going to help us reclaim the American Dream for all.

America needs leaders who understand the new world we live in and who will promote and implement new ideas for a new era. We can't solve our twenty-first-century challenges by simply investing more into twentieth-century solutions. And yet this is precisely what those who would succeed President Obama show every intention of doing.

On each of the major challenges facing America, for example, Hillary Clinton has proven herself wedded to the policies and programs of the past. Instead of reforming a higher education system that costs too much money, is too hard for nontraditional students to access and awards too many degrees that do not lead to jobs, another Clinton presidency will be about spending more money on a broken system. Instead of cutting back on regulations that stifle innovation and deny consumer choice, another Clinton presidency will be about enacting regulations her friends in the corporate world use to prevent competition. Instead of reforming an anticompetitive tax code that has made America one of the most expensive places on earth to invest and create jobs, another Clinton presidency will be about raising taxes to pay for a growing government. The election of Hillary Clinton to the presidency, in short, would be nothing more than a third Obama term. Another Clinton presidency would be a death blow to the American Dream.