an average journey in the land of opportunity: the movie

Mitt Romney will have us believe that his hard work and dedication were the only necessary factors to propel him to such success, thus he is living proof that the American Dream is alive and well.  His running mate Paul Ryan mimics the story.  They paint pictures of being just every day guys who had the same opportunities as everyone else, and it is their experiences gleaned from lifetimes of hard work and overcoming adversity that qualify them to be the next President/VP team.  While I concede that they are very presidential looking, looks just won't cut it for such important jobs.  We aren’t casting a movie here – at least that’s what we’d like to think.  If Romney is elected with Ryan at his side, however, they’ll be working from a script alright…a script written by the super rich.  Here’s how it would go:

This is the story of an average American raised by regular parents, whose regular dad earned millions as the successful CEO of American Motors before he became the Governor of Michigan.  He spent his childhood in a regular suburb neighborhood and attended a regular private prep school.  He went to regular old Stanford for a year before he took a regular missionary trip to France, a trip that had absolutely nothing to do with the Vietnam War draft.  After 30 months overseas he desperately missed his girlfriend, so he bravely returned to the U.S., and was somewhat disappointed that his student deferments and late entry to the draft would prevent him from serving his country in Vietnam.  The regular student couple got married and endured regular hardships, as most college students do, such as selling stock given to him by his father to pay tuition and living expenses.  After getting his regular B.A., he attended regular Harvard in a regular program through both the Law School and Business School.  He needed a home for his growing family, since the couple now had one child with another on the way, so dad loaned the money to buy a home in an affluent suburb, as any regular college kid might expect.  As he continued his regular studies and she stayed home with the kids (as regular wives of regular college students do), but they continued their daily struggle to survive as they were forced to chip away at their endowment of stocks...you know, the usual. 

Then the regular guy got a regular job as a management consultant, and through hard work, he became very successful at telling other people what to do...and was paid accordingly.  He was so good at it that his boss offered him the regular opportunity of starting a regular private equity investment firm, which he accepted, but only after the partnership terms were regularly restructured to where he had no professional or financial risk.  The regular company made billions through leveraged buyouts (buying another existing company with primarily borrowed money obtained by using the newly acquired company's assets as the necessary collateral).  Despite having such an ordinary job, he always worked extraordinarily hard to stay focused on the company goal of maximizing returns for investors (including himself.  This wasn't always easy, since the opportunities for his company to collect fees and turn a profit were limited to the cases in which the restructuring of the acquisition was successful or if it was a failure. 

But despite all of his hard work, he faces the same problems that most regular people face, namely poor people.  How dare they whine about not being able to afford college, or losing their jobs after a private equity firm like his forced their company into bankruptcy, or being sick and not having the money for healthcare?  His success was earned, and had absolutely nothing to do with him being born a white male into a wealthy and prominent family.  So if these poor people were only willing to work harder, they could be successful too.  He doesn't want to live in a country where these moochers are just given money to survive without earning it...that scenario would just be obscene!  So he runs for president...

He is elected, not because he bought the election or because his party was able to enact legislation prohibiting his opponent's supporters from exercising their Constitutionally-guaranteed right to vote, but because he represents the average American.  He has convinced enough people that the economy is not stifled because the big banks and corporations are too greedy, but it's because they don't have enough money to create jobs.  He is able to garner votes from the fervently religious by professing his belief in God and Jesus without telling anyone that he believes God is an actual dude that speaks through a living prophet, or that Jesus was resurrected not only in Jerusalem but also in North America, or that there are special garments (aka magic underwear) that should be worn as protection against evil spirits. 

He believes that the best society is one that has a system to reward the best people in it, and he convinces a majority that they have the opportunity to be the best too. The "best" this country has to offer are the richest and most powerful (if they were anything but the best, they wouldn't be rich and powerful, obviously), so he rewards all their hard work by enacting policies that ensure they become even richer and more powerful.  They will pay little to no taxes, and economy-strangling organizations like the EPA or OSHA are abolished.  Job-creators shouldn't be saddled with the burden of providing healthcare for their minions, I mean employees.  They should just be thankful to have a job and take care of themselves.  Religious texts are sufficient to educate future generations, so public education is not required.  And if the people who are unwilling to work hard enough to earn what is necessary to cover a lifetime of healthcare costs for themselves and/or their families, well, it just demonstrates the system works.  He is on his way to achieving his goal of making a better America.  Better for the "hard workers" at least. 

The End.

Wow...what a horrific show that will be!  Look, I have no problem that Mitt had advantages as early as the second he was born.  He's white, he's a man, and his family was very well off.  He might not want to admit it, but those amount to a massive total advantage, as illustrated by mobility studies conducted by the (1) Center for American Progress and (2) Pew's Economic Mobility Project,

• 65% of African Americans are raised in the bottom quintile of the income distribution vs. 11% of white families (2)
• 57% of African Americans are raised in the bottom quintile of the income distribution vs. 14% of white families (2)
• For both family income and family wealth, 23% of whites are raised in the top quintile vs. 2% of African Americans (2)
• 43% of those raised in the bottom quintile of the income distribution will stay at the bottom as adults, and 70% will not rise above the middle (2)
• 40% in the top quintile of family income distribution stay there, and 63% stay above the middle (2)
• There is only a 4% chance of someone raised in the bottom quintile of the income distribution to make it to to the top quintile, and only a 1% chance of making it to the top 5%, while someone born in the top 5% has a 22% chance of earning an income that is also in the top 5% (1)
• African American children who are born in the bottom quartile are nearly twice as likely to remain there as adults than are white children whose parents had identical incomes, and are four times less likely to attain the top quartile (1)
• Those with a college degree (the ability to attain which is largely influenced by family wealth and income levels) promotes those raised in the bottom quintiles to move up and prevents those in the higher quintiles from falling down for both wealth and income distributions (2)

So whether they admit it or not, it's pretty obvious that Romney and Ryan had a little more than hard work going for them.  And I don't even care that they were born with so many advantages...being born into his family is as much their fault as it is the fault of a black kid being born into a poor family - none at all.  But they should be faulted for lying about it, and more importantly, using his position to give himself an even larger undue advantage at the expense of others at a further disadvantage.  They are telling disadvantaged people that they can achieve success with hard work while supporting policies designed to prevent that very thing from occurring.

Romney has defended his paying an effective tax rate of approximately 14% on $42 million earned in 2010-2011 by saying, "I pay all the taxes that are legally required and not a dollar more.  I don't think you want someone as the candidate for president who pays more taxes than he owes." OK, that may be true, but I also don't want a dirtbag who skirts through every tax loophole he can find, then get into office to create more.  Let's remember, just because something is legal doesn't mean it's right.  If the median American household income is just over $50k and is taxed at 17%, does it seem right that someone making over 839 times that pays a lower tax rate?  Not to me it doesn't.  But if you think that's as bad as I do, don't worry...because it gets worse.  Under Ryan's tax plan, Romney would have been subject to a whopping 0.82% rate.

There's a difference between dealing with the devil and being the devil.  But what Romney and Ryan have planned would even make the devil say, "Whoa, that's fucked up."