Senator Mark Kelly (D-AZ) has a new campaign ad out. In it, he talks about how hard finances were for his family when he was growing up. Nothing wrong with that. It’s nice to see that someone has a concept of a tight family budget. Maybe that would make him more sympathetic to opponents of the government’s white elephants, such as the medium-speed rail in California. These white elephants cause huge waste, which means fewer resources for other projects or higher taxes at some point.
The problem comes with this statement Kelly makes at about the 0:07 point:
I remember my mom sitting at our kitchen table, all these papers scattered around, and she was having to make decisions about what bill to pay.
The clear implication is that she was deciding not to pay some bills.
Why? Check his bio and you learn that he’s the son of two retired police officers, who must certainly have been active police officers at the time. That would seem to have given them a decent middle-class income. Even if not, what kind of people don’t pay their bills?
I understand deferring payment by a month or two to the providers of goods and services who don’t charge interest. Is that what he means? He doesn’t say.
I think we’re supposed to think that his family was really strapped for funds. But ironically, less than one second after the part about choosing which bill to pay, he shows a home movie of, presumably, him and his twin brother. So his parents had enough money to buy a video camera and the expensive tape that those cameras used. My family had priced them in the mid-1960s and concluded that there was no way we could afford a camera and multiple films. Of course we could have afforded them, but it would have meant not going to movies or not doing something else. My parents made tradeoffs. Our family of 5 people and one dog lived on one income, the income of a high-school teacher. There’s no way my father and mother refused to pay a bill.
My guess is that his parents did pay their bills and what he saw was a parent feeling some distress because the bills made up most of their income and made it hard to save. Fortunately for them, they are retired police officers and, I bet, are making a good retirement income.
My objection here is not partisan. I remember Senator Phil Gramm from Texas, when he was running for the 1996 Republican presidential nomination talking about “my mama” trying to decide which bills to pay and which bills not to pay.
If Gramm’s memory is right, his mama set a terrible example.
My guess, though, is that both Mark Kelly is doing and Phil Gramm was doing was what politicians often do: lying.
READER COMMENTS
Fazal Majid
Feb 24 2022 at 5:45pm
Obama would often reminisce about his mother fighting with her health insurance company for coverage of her treatment for the cancer that eventually killed her:
In his case, I’m pretty sure he is speaking pure unvarnished truth (apart from the bit about “It’s not who we are as a people.”.
Mark Z
Feb 24 2022 at 9:46pm
So… they did cover the treatment then? If they didn’t, I’m guessing that’s what he would’ve been talking about. Insurance companies covering medical costs is ‘not who we are as a people?’
Matthias
Feb 24 2022 at 11:12pm
Whether they cover the bills or not, the bureaucracy to get to that decision is a pure loss.
It might be the least bad way to make this decision, of course. But it’s still a pure cost to humanity.
Similar to how a complicated tax system is bad in its own right, independent of how high the taxes are.
Knut P. Heen
Feb 25 2022 at 5:08am
He is embarrassing his parents in order to gain votes. How low is it possible to sink?
Don Boudreaux
Feb 25 2022 at 9:29am
David,
Excellent, spot-on post.
Sen. Mark Kelly was born in Orange, NJ, in 1964. Therefore, his supposed recollection from his boyhood of times being so tough that his mom couldn’t pay all of the family’s bills is likely a recollection from the early or mid-1970s – precisely the time that, we are told today, was the pinnacle of American middle-class prosperity. Many people advocate policies to restore those imaginary good ol’ days, the days before deregulation, tax cutting, the Reagan-fueled era of ‘greed,’ and the imposition of unfettered dog-eat-dog neoliberalism that has robbed all but the superrich of economic abundance and hope.
And so if Kelly’s recollection is accurate, that’s yet another piece of evidence against the commonplace assertion that the mid-1970s are a time to which Americans should look back with longing.
But of course Kelly is almost certainly lying.
I, being born in 1958, remember the mid-1970s very well. My own family was relatively poor by American standards. My dad, who dropped out of school in 6th grade, worked first as a bus driver in New Orleans and then for most of his life as a pipefitter in a shipyard. (My dad later earned his GED, but he nevertheless kept working as a pipefitter.) My mom started working in 1973 as a clerk in the shipyard’s secretarial pool. I do not recall that my parents ever did not pay a bill. Perhaps they kept such hardship from their children. But had such hardship been routine, my siblings and I certainly would have known of it and now remember it. And my parents, on their meager income, chose to send their four children to Catholic school – so they paid tuition that most parents didn’t pay.
Kelly is now in a profession that not only tolerates, but encourages, untruthfulness. He should be – but, of course, he won’t be – deeply ashamed.
David Henderson
Feb 25 2022 at 9:56am
Thanks, Don.
And thanks for bringing the discussion back to my blog post rather than going on a tangent.
Kevin Corcoran
Feb 25 2022 at 4:28pm
Another possibility is that Senator Kelly’s parents weren’t exactly judicious about their spending, and as such when the bills came due, they didn’t have the money left to pay them all. I grew up very low income, one of five kids in a single income household, and I saw from an early age how common that sort of thing is all around me.
But to answer the question “do politicians hear themselves” I suspect the answer is “yes,” but in a cynical way. When politicians put out stories about their struggles growing up, what they hear themselves saying is something they know will sound like a good story to the average voter. And I think they also believe, correctly, that not one voter in a thousand is actually going to take the time to think about what some tape recorder footage of the family really implies about their financial status.
Billy Kaubashine
Feb 25 2022 at 4:53pm
Just like Biden’s statement that he “grew up in a family where the price at the pump was felt in the kitchen”, implying that rising gas prices crimped his family’s food budget.
The Biden family didn’t have to engage in food triage related to pricey gasoline. He was born in 1942. When Biden was growing up, the price of gasoline was flat. And it was cheap.
His Dad ran the largest Chevy dealer in the state. They weren’t poor, and they certainly weren’t feeling pain at the pump
Robert Seber
Feb 25 2022 at 6:11pm
Excellent post. Every time I hear a politician talk about the kitchen table I throw up all over my kitchen table.
David Henderson
Feb 26 2022 at 4:45pm
You’ve been quoted here.
steve
Feb 26 2022 at 5:09pm
Probably lying or embellishing at least so you are likely correct. I tend to not make assumptions since I have learned over the years that even people who should be OK run into situations where they have trouble. A family member loses their job and you are helping to support them. An unexpected medical bill. Its not always about spending incorrectly. Sometimes you just dont have enough money due to unforeseen happenings. More commonly I think for most people it is likely a cash flow issue.
Steve
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