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Friday 21 September 2012

Mitt Romney Is The Forbes Number 400 And Student Debt

Republican Presidential Candidate Mitt Romney has rightly zeroed in on high unemployment as the biggest threat to both ordinary Americans’ prosperity and President Barack Obama’s reelection prospects. But those middle class families who have made it through the recession without prolonged periods of unemployment or losing their homes to the real estate bust, have another big worry: helping their kids pay for college while saving for their own retirements and even, in some cases, helping their own aging parents. Maybe if Romney spent more time talking about that huge middle class concern, it would help him to narrow his yawning empathy gap with the President. No, this isn’t about Romney’s secretly recorded comments at a $50,000-a-plate fundraiser about the 47% of Americans who “are dependent upon government” and pay no income tax. (My examination of the underlying tax numbers is here.) Instead, it’s prompted by his comments at the same Florida fundraiser about his own inheritance and edge in life—or lack thereof. According to a transcript of the video released by Mother Jones, he told donors: The Forbes 400: The Richest People In America Luisa Kroll Luisa Kroll Forbes Staff Memo To Mitt Romney: The 47% Pay Taxes Too Janet Novack Janet Novack Forbes Staff Romney Paid At 14% Federal Tax Rate In 2011, Pegs 20 Year Average At 20% Janet Novack Janet Novack Forbes Staff Obama's Student Loans Paid Off, Will Yours? Janet Novack Janet Novack Forbes Staff By the way, both my dad and Ann’s dad did quite well in their life, but when they came to the end of their lives, and, and passed along inheritances to Ann and to me, we both decided to give it all away. So, I had inherited nothing. Everything that Ann and I have we earned the old-fashioned way, and that’s by hard work. True, Romney built Bain Capital and a fortune Forbes estimates at $230 million (not counting the $100 million in a trust for his sons and grandkids) with hard work, smarts, backing from Bain Consulting-founder Bill Bain and investments from unrelated rich folks—not with money from his dad. Similarly, 70% of those on the new Forbes 400 list of the richest people in America built the businesses underlying their wealth from scratch. But that doesn’t mean most of them didn’t start life with a family edge. Before Bill Gates, the nation’s richest man, dropped out of Harvard to found Microsoft, his prominent lawyer father paid his educational bills, including at the ritzy private day school where he was introduced early to computers. When his computer-loving dentist dad realized 11-year-old Mark Zuckerberg was a prodigy, he hired a software programmer to tutor him privately and then sent him to private boarding school Phillips Exeter before Harvard. Romney? He attended a top private prep school too. During her speech at the Republican convention and in interviews (such as this one with the Boston Globe in 1994), Ann Romney has described how they married while still students at Brigham Young University and moved into a $62 a month basement apartment where they “ate a lot of pasta and Tuna fish.” But 300 guests, including the president of Ford Motor and chairman of GM were at their country club wedding reception. And they paid their bills while in school by selling stock that Mitt’s dad, George Romney, the former governor of Michigan and CEO of American Motors, had bought for him back when the car company’s shares were beaten down. When the young family moved to Massachusetts so Mitt could attend Harvard law and business schools, his dad lent him money to buy a $42,000 house in Belmont—a house that the Romneys sold seven years later for $90,000. Their sale of stock during that period meant that even though Mitt was bringing in no income, Ann was able to stay home full time with their boys—something a growing number of women in a recent Forbes poll said they would like to do too, if they could afford it. (A side note: Since I’m implicitly criticizing Romney for underestimating his own advantages, I should mention that a new report from United For A Fair Economy, a liberal group that supports the “tax fairness” and the estate tax, asserts that the Forbes 400 list creates a misleading “rags to riches” story by labeling so many of its members as self-made. I disagree. I believe most readers understand that building a fortune “from scratch” doesn’t necessarily mean that someone started out dirt poor, as did Obama-backer Oprah Winfrey or Romney money man/energy adviser Harold Hamm, who grew up as the youngest of 13 children in a sharecropper family. In fact, I think most Americans get that while a spectacularly successful, creative and driven entrepreneur can arise from any background, a kid’s overall odds of doing well in life are affected by the education and wealth of his parents and the education they can provide to him. In this Pew Research Center poll, 46% said the rich are wealthy mainly because “they know the right people or were born into wealthy families “ and 43% said they’re rich mainly from because “of their own hard work, ambition or education”. Interestingly, that opinion split is roughly the same across all income groups.) There’s nothing wrong with the leg up Gates, Zuckerberg and Romney got from their parents. It clearly didn’t dampen their drive and doesn’t detract from their accomplishments. In fact, it’s exactly what most parents want to do for their kids— give them the best possible shot at reaching their full potential, even if they’re not Harvard material like Gates, Zuckerberg, Romney and President Barack Obama, a Harvard Law grad like Romney. (To totally “equalize” opportunity in this country, we’d have to engage in a level of redistribution beyond what Obama or any leading Democrats have proposed—a level that would indeed undermine the incentives for hard work. It’s not going to happen.) At the secretly recorded private fundraiser, after noting he had “inherited nothing,’’ Romney added: I say that because there’s the perception that, “Oh, you were born with a silver spoon,” you know, “You never had to earn anything,” and so forth. And, and frankly, I was born with a silver spoon, which is the greatest gift you could have, which is to get born in America. I’ll tell ya, there is—95 percent of life is set up for you if you’re born in this country.

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