Politics

FACT CHECK: Rubio Rhetoric Breaks with Past, but Ideas Don’t

Published

10 years ago

April 16, 2015

Republican presidential candidate Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., discusses their recently released tax reform plan, Wednesday, April 15, 2015, at the Heritage Foundation in Washington. (AP Photo/Molly Riley)

STEVE PEOPLES, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — Florida Sen. Marco Rubio launched a Republican presidential campaign this week with a promise to reject “the leaders and ideas of the past.”

It was a not-so-subtle jab from a 43-year-old fresh-faced, senator at his likely 2016 competitors, Republican Jeb Bush and Democrat Hillary Clinton, whose families were cemented as political dynasties in the 1990s. A closer look at Rubio’s early priorities, however, suggests that many of his policy prescriptions were born in the same era he’s vowing to leave behind.

Moreover, he confused his opening argument by comparing today’s taxes and government spending to 1999, the year Bush took office as Florida governor and Bill Clinton was president.

A look at a few facts behind his rhetoric:

RUBIO: “Too many of our leaders and their ideas are stuck in the 20th century.”

THE FACTS: On foreign policy, taxes and government spending, many of Rubio’s policies are rooted in Republican positions from the 1990s or even earlier.

Foreign policy stands out in particular for Rubio, who embraces the same muscular approach that dominated the Reagan and last Bush administrations.

While some conservatives now favor a reduced international footprint, Rubio has shown an appetite for pre-emptive military action against the Islamic State group and has not ruled out ground forces. He has also become Congress’ leading opponent of Obama’s plans to normalize relations with Cuba. The senator said in a Tuesday interview that the United States should not open an embassy on the island and should continue its longstanding policy that has isolated Cuba since the early 1960s.

On spending, Rubio has repeatedly endorsed a constitutional amendment to balance the federal budget. Republican calls for such an amendment persisted throughout the Clinton years in the late 1990s after being embraced by President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s.

Rubio is also calling for sweeping changes to entitlement programs such as Medicare and Social Security to control government spending. While the push for “premium supports” to control Medicare costs was born this century, pieces of Rubio’s plans to change Social Security are decades old. Specifically, he would repeal the “earnings test” for anyone who claims Social Security before full retirement age but keeps working.

The GOP’s 1992 platform outlined the same position. Rubio also wants to raise the retirement age, something George W. Bush suggested as a presidential candidate before the 2000 election.

On taxes, Rubio recently proposed a comprehensive plan that would maintain a 35-percent rate for top earners, but reduce taxes on corporations and eliminate the capital gains tax altogether. He departs from a long-held GOP position that the rate for top earners should be lower. But calls for reduced corporate and capital gains taxes dominated the GOP’s tax platform throughout the 1990s.

On education, Rubio says the nation needs “a 21st century approach” to education. He supports an expansion of digital and online courses as part of a larger focus on school choice. The technology may be new, but calls for school choice are not. Republicans throughout the 1990s wanted to give parents more educational choices.

Rubio this week said more high school students need to graduate “ready to work” in jobs such as mechanics, plumbers and welders. For decades, political leaders — including Jeb Bush during his time as Florida governor — have promoted stronger vocational education.

___

RUBIO: “Our leaders put us at a disadvantage by taxing, borrowing and regulating like it’s 1999.”

THE FACTS: While Rubio was surely trying to have fun with a popular Prince song, he’s wrong to liken the government’s current taxing and borrowing to that of 1999.

The nation’s national debt was in far better shape at that time, when the federal government carried budget surpluses during the final years of the Clinton presidency. Taxes were far higher in 1999 as well. Tax revenues then exceeded 19 percent as a percentage of the gross domestic product compared with 17.5 percent in 2014, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Today’s lower taxes come from Bush-era tax cuts and President Barack Obama’s decision to extend them permanently.

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U.S. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries Speaks on Democracy at Commonwealth Club

Based on his first speech as House minority leader, “The ABCs of Democracy” by Grand Central Publishing is an illustrated children’s book for people of all ages. Each letter contrasts what democracy is and isn’t, as in: “American Values over Autocracy”, “Benevolence over Bigotry” and “The Constitution over the Cult.”

Published

9 hours ago

December 22, 2024

Oakland Post

: House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries at the Commonwealth Club World Affairs Council on Dec. 2. Photo by Johnnie Burrell. Book cover: "The ABCs of Democracy" by Hakeem Jeffries.

By Linda Parker Pennington
Special to The Post

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries addressed an enthusiastic overflow audience on Monday at San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club, launching his first book, “The ABCs of Democracy.”

Based on his first speech as House minority leader, “The ABCs of Democracy” by Grand Central Publishing is an illustrated children’s book for people of all ages.

Each letter contrasts what democracy is and isn’t, as in: “American Values over Autocracy”, “Benevolence over Bigotry” and “The Constitution over the Cult.”

Less than a month after the election that will return Donald Trump to the White House, Rep. Jeffries also gave a sobering assessment of what the Democrats learned.

“Our message just wasn’t connecting with the real struggles of the American people,” Jeffries said. “The party in power is the one that will always pay the price.”

On dealing with Trump, Jeffries warned, “We can’t fall into the trap of being outraged every day at what Trump does. That’s just part of his strategy. Remaining calm in the face of turmoil is a choice.”

He pointed out that the razor-thin margin that Republicans now hold in the House is the lowest since the Civil War.

Asked what the public can do, Jeffries spoke about the importance of being “appropriately engaged. Democracy is not on autopilot. It takes a citizenry to hold politicians accountable and a new generation of young people to come forward and serve in public office.”

With a Republican-led White House, Senate, House and Supreme Court, Democrats must “work to find bi-partisan common ground and push back against far-right extremism.”

He also described how he is shaping his own leadership style while his mentor, Speaker-Emeritus Nancy Pelosi, continues to represent San Francisco in Congress. “She says she is not hanging around to be like the mother-in-law in the kitchen, saying ‘my son likes his spaghetti sauce this way, not that way.’”

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MacArthur Fellow Dorothy Roberts’ Advocates Restructure of Child Welfare System

Roberts’s early work focused on Black women’s reproductive rights and their fight for reproductive justice. In “Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty 1997)”, she analyzes historical and contemporary policies and practices that denied agency to Black women and sought to control their childbearing—from forced procreation during slavery, to coercive sterilization and welfare reform—and advocates for an expanded understanding of reproductive freedom.

Published

9 hours ago

December 22, 2024

Oakland Post

Dorothy Roberts. Photo courtesy of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Special to The Post

When grants were announced Oct. 1, it was noted that eight of the 22 MacArthur Fellows were African American. Among the recipients of the so-called ‘genius grants’ are scholars, visual and media artists a poet/writer, historian, and dancer/choreographer who each receive $800,000 over a five-year period to spend as they see fit.

Their names are Ruha Benjamin, Jericho Brown, Tony Cokes, Jennifer L. Morgan, Ebony G. Patterson, Shamel Pitts, Jason Reynolds, and Dorothy Roberts. This is the eighth and last in the series highlighting the Black awardees. The report below on Dorothy Roberts is excerpted from the MacArthur Fellows web site.

A graduate of Yale University with a law degree from Harvard, Dorothy Roberts is a legal scholar and public policy researcher exposing racial inequities embedded within health and social service systems.

Sine 2012, she has been a professor of Law and Sociology, and on the faculty in the department of Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

Roberts’s work encompasses reproductive health, bioethics, and child welfare. She sheds light on systemic inequities, amplifies the voices of those directly affected, and boldly calls for wholesale transformation of existing systems.

This work prompted Roberts to examine the treatment of children of color in the U.S. child welfare system.

After nearly two decades of research and advocacy work alongside parents, social workers, family defense lawyers, and organizations, Roberts has concluded that the current child welfare system is in fact a system of family policing with alarmingly unequal practices and outcomes. Her 2001 book, “Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare,” details the outsized role that race and class play in determining who is subject to state intervention and the results of those interventions.

Through interviews with Chicago mothers who had interacted with Child Protective Services (CPS), Roberts shows that institutions regularly punish the effects of poverty as neglect.

CPS disproportionately investigates Black and Indigenous families, especially if they are low-income, and children from these families are much more likely than white children to be removed from their families after CPS referral.

In “Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World (2022),” Roberts traces the historical, cultural, and political forces driving the racial and class imbalance in child welfare interventions.

These include stereotypes about Black parents as negligent, devaluation of Black family bonds, and stigmatization of parenting practices that fall outside a narrow set of norms.

She also shows that blaming marginalized individuals for structural problems, while ignoring the historical roots of economic and social inequality, fails families and communities.

Roberts argues that the engrained oppressive features of the current system render it beyond repair. She calls for creating an entirely new approach focused on supporting families rather than punishing them.

Her support for dismantling the current child welfare system is unsettling to some. Still, her provocation inspires many to think more critically about its poor track record and harmful design.

By uncovering the complex forces underlying social systems and institutions, and uplifting the experiences of people caught up in them, Roberts creates opportunities to imagine and build more equitable and responsive ways to ensure child and family safety.