American Dreams by Marco Rubio Read Free Book Online

this point—as in every time of trial in their lives—Daniel and Becky turned to their faith to get them through it. With three boys who depended on them, they prayed every day that God would reveal the right way forward. Becky considered going back to school in order to get an outside job, just so they could have a steady income stream and hopefully some benefits. But despite all the talk and all the spending in Washington, jobs remained scarce—good jobs were practically nonexistent. Taking a flier on finding decent outside work didn’t seem like a safe bet against the cost of going back to school.
    Eventually, around 2012, the Broyleses’ business began to turn around. A couple contracts for hotel banquet tables started trickling in. Customers started returning to the shop again. Business wasn’t what it had been before the recession, but it was enough to break even and keep the debt from rising. And then, just when Daniel and Becky had convinced themselves to continue working hard to keep the doors of their business open, the government stepped in to “help” them again. The Affordable Care Act hit the Broyles family—and thus their family business—hard. Their health insurance premium had been rising by small amounts each year for a while. But when the law went into effect in 2013, it shot up from $520 to $660. Worse, their deductible doubled, from $2,500 to $5,000. They couldn’t afford it, so they dropped their coverage and turned to a faith-based program called Medi-Share, which allows members to spread out the burden of health care costs and coverage.
    Daniel and Becky’s business is still operating—for now, anyway. They love their work and they draw great meaning from it. Their oldest son helps out while he works toward his online bachelor’s degree. They’re not bitter, but you sense that they feel the system is stacked against them. Any success they have seems to come despite the mandates coming from Washington.
    The Broyleses’ story is a graphic, real-life example of how our political leadership—from both parties—is failing families who can’t afford to influence the agenda in Washington. What they really need is not another expansion of the federal government disguised as help for the middle class. What they need is a strong and growing free-enterprise economy. This has been Washington’s greatest failure of all. It has failed to put in place policies that would foster such an economy in this new century.
    Fostering a strong and growing free-enterprise economy in the twenty-first century means meeting four fundamental challenges: making America the best place in the world to invest and create jobs, keeping America the global leader in innovation, ensuring access to markets and consumers for American products, and winning the global competition for the most talented and innovative people. It’s fair to ask how meeting these challenges would help a struggling home furnishings store in Orlando. The answer is the same way it helped my father when he was tending bar in Miami or the way it helps the hardworking Uber driver in Washington D.C.: through the wealth-generating multiplier effect of an unfettered market economy. American investment and ingenuity creates jobs and careers in building automobiles and airplanes, creating personal computers and the Internet, or discovering new biomedicines and developing apps for smartphones. Then the people who have these jobs buy houses. And when they need to decorate their houses, they come and see Daniel and Becky Broyles.

    Our first challenge is to make America once again the best place in the world to invest and create jobs.
    There was once a time when there were only a handful of countries you could possibly invest in with any degree of confidence. But now there are dozens of developed economies capable of and willing to host new investment. This is good news for global prosperity. But