GOP senator and presidential candidate Marco Rubio’s inability to manage his personal finances apparently has been a widely-known secret among Republican Party insiders for a long time, but now the media are picking up the story. A piece on CNBC today, which you can read here, slams Rubio’s financial mismanagement.
“Among the serious contenders for the presidency, Mr. Rubio stands out for his youth, his meteoric political rise — and for the persistent doubts about his financial management, to the point that Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign flagged the issue when vetting Mr. Rubio as a possible running mate in 2012 …. Many of those troubles have played out in an unusually public way, leading even some of his supporters to worry. As he rose in politics, he sometimes intermingled personal and political money — using a state Republican Party credit card years ago to pay for a paving project at his home and for travel to a family reunion, and putting his relatives on campaign payrolls. … A review of the Rubio family’s finances — including many new documents — reveals a series of decisions over the past 15 years that experts called imprudent: significant debts; a penchant to spend heavily on luxury items … ; a strikingly low savings rate, even when Mr. Rubio was earning large sums; and inattentive accounting that led to years of unpaid local government fees.”
Especially disturbing is Rubio’s lifelong dependence on a single wealthy patron: Billionaire Norman Braman, who has many business interests to protect and wouldn’t mind owning a president, who up to now has “subsidized Mr. Rubio’s job as a college instructor, hired him as lawyer and continues to employ his wife.” And now Braman is bankrolling Rubio’s presidential campaign. How could President Rubio not give Mr. Braman whatever he wants?
And then there’s the sheer hypocrisy of a man who spends money he doesn’t have like a drunken sailor on luxuries he can’t afford peddling austerity policies — that is, policies that impose austerity on the poor, unemployed, hungry, elderly, disabled, on people who have nothing.
Rubio is being touted as a rising political superstar. But it’s all an illusion. Move along, folks, there’s nothing to see here.
Photo: Future president, or just a financial profligate with a taste for high living on someone else’s dime?