See Me Squeegee

One of the reasons I started this blog is that I’m an endurance athlete.  My mind wanders while I swim/bike/run and I have time to fully digest my thoughts, dreams, and opinions.  Today was one of those days – on the heels of the political conventions, with tax / deficit / fiscal policy ringing in my ears, my mind drifted toward my own story with the current state of American finances.  In case this speaks to you, I offer it here.

I was born a few miles away from Joe Biden, in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania (you probably know Scranton, its neighbor, from “The Office”.)  I was born a few days after my 25-year old father lost his job.  I was born to a 25-year old mother who had given up her job as a bank teller to move to where my father  could begin his career.  I mention their ages because I’m currently almost a decade older than they were when they had me, and I worry about taking care of myself, let alone a family.

I spent my first few days on this planet in an incubator, having been born a few weeks earlier than planned.  While my father searched for work a few states away, I gave my mother a pretty hard time, proving allergic to most types of baby formula she tried to feed me.  I endured a few surgeries and long hospital stays before I turned two.  I can personally and vividly remember points in my life at which I had experienced more surgeries than birthdays.

For all of that, I grew up middle class and had all kinds of educational and recreational opportunities.  I was fortunate to go to college on my parents’ dime.  I spent my first few years after college chasing my childhood dreams, working for my favorite football team (the University of Michigan), basketball team (Detroit Pistons, where I “won” a world championship ring), and sporting event (the Olympics).  After that I earned a masters degree and started a career in education.  And as part of that whole experience, I’ve even earned enough money in a year – more than once – to be on the Tea Party side of tax policy, cut off from tax benefits because the government “punished success”.

When I was a kid, my parents called me Alex P. Keaton for my conservative political views.  I’ve voted Republican in my past.  And with what I’d have called good reason – I worked hard, got good grades and test scores, went to good schools, and felt that I “built that”.  I watched my parents “build that”, from unemployment on the day of my birth to a middle class lifestyle.

But as proud as I am of some of the things I’ve done; as much as I adore my parents and appreciate the life they gave me, my brother, and my sister; as many instances of hard work as I can point to where one of us truly earned our way in this world, I know that Barack Obama is right.  We didn’t build that alone.  Here’s how it went down:

Like I said, I had a bunch of surgeries as a kid.  I remember being maybe 8 or so and working with an operating room nurse who was having trouble with the gas version of the anesthesia.  I calmly told her that I actually preferred the IV – by that point in my life I wasn’t scared of needles.  But here’s the thing – even while I was spending some quality weeks of my toddler life in hospitals and on operating tables, my parents were able to save for my college education and for my family’s future.  You see, we had health insurance that was negotiated by unions. Without that, things may have been grim, but even though my family lived white-collar lifestyles from the day I can remember, the UAW negotiated my health plan.  I owe my lifelong health to union benefits.

If you call anyone well-educated, I’d fit the definition.  I could read by age three; in kindergarten I’d bring newspaper clippings to show-and-tell.  I spent my whole educational career on honor rolls and I have two degrees from a university that QS – an international educational consultancy – ranks in the top 20 in the world.  But I didn’t “build that” alone – I’ve never attended a private school.  My parents moved from a lousy school district to a very good school district a couple months before I started kindergarten – I still remember…our lawn was a mess and other parts of the house were in disrepair as we moved into the lemon of the block, but as an adult I understand why we needed to get to a better district – and I attended public K-12, a public university for my undergrad degree, and a public university for my masters degree.  Government-sponsored education is all I’ve ever known, and it’s all I’ve ever needed.

In fact, my whole family is public school.  My parents went to Catholic schools from grade school through college (and grad school for my dad), and my brother and sister each did stints in Catholic school.  But we all went to public high school and feel better for the experience.  And between the three of us the count is currently four degrees from the University of Michigan and one from Michigan State, with my sister working on a masters of her own in Illinois and my father, now, using a government grant to get his masters from Michigan and become a public school teacher.

Now, it depends on your definition of success, but here’s the count for my family – my parents are comfortably retired, my brother runs a student achievement program at a public high school and is held in high regard in his district, my sister has been promoted a few times in the last two years in her advertising role, and I run the educational arm of a test prep company.  And we did it all based on public education – my brother and I both used federally-subsidized loans to go to grad school; he even used Obama-based unemployment funding to jump-start his prerequisite study before school began, which allowed him to start/finish school a year earlier.  So…I’m proud of what we’ve each built, but I know we didn’t build it alone.

Like I’ve said, my brother used federal unemployment benefits to redefine his path in the world, and it’s made a huge difference.  He also recently took advantage of programs to allow for hassle-free foreclosure, as he walked away  from a drowning-underwater mortgage to move closer to his job as a public school program leader and put more time into his career (his commute has gone down from around an hour to maybe ten minutes, and he’s investing all that extra time into his students).

Similarly, my parents had a healthy amount of their retirement dependent upon the auto industry (we landed in Detroit shortly after I was born).  And without Obama’s – not Romney’s, even though he grew up a few miles from me – bailout of the auto industry much of that would have been lost.

And here’s my point – it’s probably arrogant to say that we’ve lived the American Dream, but shoot…if there’s such a thing as the American Dream, I’d have to think it includes a nicely-kept home with a pool; three kids who all graduate from college, pursue higher education, and support themselves comfortably; family vacations and good health (most of us are going to Washington for the Marine Corps Marathon a few weeks before election day); and the promise of a comfortable retirement.  So, yeah, I think we’ve lived the American Dream.  And it wasn’t without hard work – especially as an adult I revere the things my parents did to build such an incredible life for us.

But they didn’t “build that” alone.  When I look at the federal programs – socialism if you want to call it that – that we’ve used, I’m struck by this.  Public schools, union healthcare, subsidized student loans, governmentally-intervened pension benefits, mortgage relief…  The government has provided my family with plenty of opportunities to thrive, and we’ve capitalized.  But unlike when I was 18, I’m not willing to wake up on second base and assume I hit a double.  I know that circumstances were good for me and my family, so as proud as I am of what my parents and siblings have accomplished, I’m just as grateful for the circumstances that put us all in positions to do so.

When I was in high school and college, I held very conservative political views. I did my homework and got good grades; why should anyone else get a free pass from the government because they didn’t work as hard?  I applied to the University of Michigan (and was accepted) during the school’s duration at the center of the affirmative action debate, and I always wondered why people who were less qualified than my high school friends would somehow be granted an advantage in admissions.  I worried that the intervention of government would strip me of what I had rightfully earned.  I “built that” – why should someone else be given it?

It wasn’t until I taught high school in an adjacent school district to the one I attended that I saw the stark difference and realized the advantages I had been given.  It wasn’t until I had left the comfort of the middle class and interacted with people from all walks of life – from different backgrounds, cultures, states, and countries – that I realized that the circumstances under which I built what I built were vastly different from those of many others.

And it wasn’t until recent political events and mantras declared a “war on class” that I really stopped to think about the ways that the government set me and my family up for success and opportunity.  Statistically, I might fall with the Republicans.  Excepting for the fact that my freakishly-healthy parents will probably outlive me, inheritance/estate taxes will take a big chunk away from me.  My income is at least top half, so “redistribution” can’t help me (at least at current).  And I don’t plan on getting gay-married, having an abortion, or being female and wanting equal pay.

But to me it comes down to this – Barack Obama’s book is “The Audacity of Hope”, but the Republican economic philosophy to me stinks of “The Audacity of Pride”.  Those who have the audacity to think that they earned what they earned alone; that they thrived in spite of government and not in some part because of it; that they’re entitled to the rewards of “the free market” (which, in the US, requires government intervention in the form of the FDA, the legal system, the transportation system, etc.) without the costs of creating an effective market…those people exercise selective vision.

If you were to look at me or my family, you’d immediately see “middle class” and probably “upper middle class”.  You might think that we’re far past the point of needing government assistance, but we’re also far from the audacity to think that we’ve done without it or will never need it again.  The middle class exists – I exist – because of union programs and government programs designed to invest in American people.  I want that to continue.  I’m voting for Barack Obama.

Paul Ryan is a liar.

I actually defended him, somewhat, in the wake of the RNC – he never actually lied about that GM plant closing in Wisconsin.  While fact-checkers may have classified his comments as “misleading” (that plant was closed before Obama took office, and the plan to close it was made well before the election), he was deft enough as a lawyer/politician to phrase it such that his comments were 100% true.  If the American people want to blame Obama for the plant closing, well, they can choose what to believe, but Ryan did not lie.

Oh, but he did…in a way that cuts closer to my heart than a slam at  Obama does (and we all know that hurts me).

Paul Ryan claims to have run a sub-3-hour marathon – he said as much, with surprising specificity, in a recent interview.  Even worse, given my PR of 3:10, Paul Ryan says he ran a faster marathon than me, and a faster marathon than George W. Bush (who has a 3:44…but I remember him doing something closer to 3:30).  But in fact, Ryan lied.  Ryan’s time is actually worse than Sarah Palin’s.  She was 3:59.  He was 4:01, according to Runner’s World.  P.R. lied about his PR.

Now, one could argue that this story will blow up out of proportion and detract attention from the real issues and that Ryan was trying to be affable on the radio and may have misspoken.  But that’s bull.  A few reasons, some personal and some not:

-Ryan’s brother is a Boston qualifier, and Ryan is a self-described workout junkie.  He knows marathon times, at least somewhat, and knows what that kind of thing means to competitive runners.  No excuses.

-Ryan also knows that he’s under public scrutiny – the same kind of scrutiny that he gleefully exploits with Barack Obama’s misplaced pronoun “that”.  Can’t have it both ways, Paul.

-Sub-3 is a huge deal.  Above the Olympic Trials cutoff and below the Boston qualifying times, that’s the milestone for elite.  Ryan can’t just claim to have that standard and be over an hour off.  That’s like claiming to have run around a 4-minute mile in high school, or to have been a state champion.  If Ryan were off by 10 minutes in the 3:45-3:55 range, whatever.  But he picked a big milestone.

-Not only that, but he just missed a milestone in the 4-hour mark in his actual race.  He wasn’t “just under” anything – he was just over another hourly milestone.  So he can’t even claim that.

So what does this mean?  Paul Ryan is a jerk in the John Edwards mold.  He thinks he can strut around and impress people with his P90x workouts, fake-marathon times, folksy charm and handsome-for-a-politician looks, and we’ll just eat it up.  I don’t want to play the “if he’s lying about this who knows what else he’s lying about” card, so I’ll hold back on that.  But let’s call it what it is – Paul Ryan is a devious character.  If Politifact is to be believed, his political speeches are deliberately misleading – almost worse than lying, in fact, because he obviously pored over the details to make sure that he spoke exactly the truth but not a word more colorfully to shed any light on what an appropriate understanding of the truth would entail.  And now this – a blatant, specific lie to make himself look good, and a half-assed attempt to cover it up.

Paul Ryan’s greatest sin in my eyes?  He lied to say that he was better than me.  Rosie Ruiz Ryan, faking marathon excellence for limited glory.  If he can cut taxes as quickly as he cuts hours off his race time, he may be onto something.  But from now on, I don’t believe him for a minute…or for the 62 minutes he’s probably lying about.