Marco Rubio Personal Finances Facing More Scrutiny

“You’ll understand it. Marco Rubio has a basic disaster on finance”.

Those statements also happen to be the ones that Rubio has not yet made public, though he has been pressed repeatedly to do so, and has promised to release them soon.

The risk for Rubio, who has acknowledged “a lack of bookkeeping skills”, is that the credit card may become a symbol of a larger pattern of financial challenges in his recent past, including a brush with foreclosure on a second home in 2010 over late mortgage payments and the recent liquidation of a retirement account that prompted a large tax penalty.

I don’t think his record on immigration will derail his chances, just as I never thought Mitt Romney’s health care record would keep him from getting the Republican nomination in 2012. They came up again during the third Republican debate.

Even before he [Marco Rubio] announced his Presidential campaign, he had the worst attendance record in the Senate.

On Saturday, Rubio released his credit card statements from the years of 2005 and 2006 – which showed he spent just $65,000 on party business. Nor has he faced the pressures of being a front-runner, scrutiny that has taken down plenty of previous candidates. ‘It was a mistake, ‘ he said. Back in 2008, the Miami Herald discovered that Rubio failed to disclose, “a $135,000 home-equity loan he obtained from a bank controlled by his political supporters”.

Not for doing anything wrong, Rubio contends, but for creating confusion. ‘As often as it is remarked, it always bears repeating: in politics appearances are as important as reality’.

In 2010, a Florida man filed an ethics complaint against Rubio for his misuse of the state party card, but two years later, the state ethics commission tossed out the case.

Questions over the personal charges first emerged in 2010 during his successful U.S. Senate campaign.

In total, records show he made $16,052 in personal charges.

Of those charges, one was accidental.

Rubio paid more than $3,700 to a tiling company. “I’m anxious about the finances of everyday Americans who today are struggling in an economy that is not producing good-paying jobs while everything else costs more”.

“When Donald comes across a poll he doesn’t like, he gets weird and he does these sorts of odd things and that’s fine – that’s the sort of campaign he wants to run and he’s entitled to it”, Mr. Rubio said at a news conference Wednesday in Goffstown, N.H. A campaign statement also said the Las Vegas charges were linked to a business trip that he extended to visit relatives. “It was American Express”, Rubio told reporters in New Hampshire. Marco Rubio (Fla.) said he believes that, if the Republican Party “does not change”, it can not be “a national party that leads the country”.

“If there was a policy, no one knew it, not the party spokesperson, not Marco, not former Speaker Dean Cannon who also put personal charges on his card, not anyone else”, Harris wrote.

In all, the personal expenses amounted to $7,243.74 out of the $64,777.82 charged to the card from January 2005-October 2006.

“If there was a personal expense, I paid it”, Rubio said.