GOP Overachievers

One of the themes we keep hearing from Republicans is how through their own greatness and hard work they have become rich.  The message is essentially if you are poor, it serves you right.  You should have worked harder.

The thing that seriously annoys me is how people like Mitt Romney seem to conveniently forget the insane level of privilege that they were accidentally born into.  The fact is you could take any average white kid and give them access to riches, incredible education, power, and a stable family and there is a very good chance that they would be successful too.

Willard Mitt Romney was named after J Willard Marriott (millionaire hotelier), a family friend, and his father's cousin who was a quarterback for the Chicago Bears.  Mitt's father was CEO of American Motors and became a millionaire from his stock options.

That kind of money would probably explain how a family of four kids could afford to send Mitt to an elite boarding school whose current fees range from $22K-38K a year.  Or to put it another way, if you wanted to send your first grader to the school until they graduated it would cost you about $300,000 and that's not including expenses, inflation or the extra $35K it would cost if the child boards from the ninth through twelfth grade.

Romney then spent a year at Stanford, graduated from BYU, and then took a four year Harvard degree in law.  Between Stamford and BYU he dodged the draft by spending three years in France unsuccessfully attempting to recruit French people into his Mormon cult.  In three years he averaged one new cult member every three months.  But in all fairness convincing French people to give up alcohol cannot be that easy.

I think it would be fair to say that the cost of raising Mitt Romney from birth until he graduated from Harvard would have exceeded a million dollars in today's money.  Can you imagine how few families of four in the United States have that kind of money to throw at their children?

And this really is my point.  If Mitt wants to talk about having a successful career, that's great.  But it delusional to believe that it was nothing more than being smart and working hard.

By comparison, let's talk about Joe Normal.  He's a fictional guy born on the same day as Mitt Romney.  Joe Normal had to skip on the $300K schooling, so he didn't get to go to Harvard.  Joe Normal didn't have a rich family to pay for the three year vacation in France, so instead he got sent to Vietnam.  He comes back and uses the GI Bill to pay for community college, but has a hard time focusing because he has post traumatic stress disorder.  So he drops out of college, and ends up working for Walmart stacking shelves, although later he gets promoted to department supervisor where he makes $36,000 a year.

I could give you a million more examples of Joe and Anne Normal's working all over this country, busting their asses for the kind of money that wouldn't even pay for a year of fancy private school; even if they had no other expenses.

These people are not lazy or stupid.  They are normal every day people.  But they will never have access to the kinds of opportunities afforded to the rich and well connected.  It is this truth that Republicans want us to forget.

Now I am aware that there are many Republicans out there who were not born with a silver spoon in their mouth, and made it big, without a rich family.  That's great too.  But it does not mean that everyone else has the potential to achieve the same simply by working hard.  And this is why it is important to have social programs, quality education, and a safety net to protect the poor.  Sadly though Republican egomaniacs don't like that answer because it reminds them that they didn't "build that" alone.  In fact, they probably had help along the way that got them to the successful place they ended up.

And let us also not forget that Joe Normal working in Walmart for an average pay check is not a loser, or a failure.  He did what he could, and he worked hard.  He deserves health care, a reasonable standard of living, and to be respected.  And his taxes should not be paying for millionaires to get a tax break.