UPDATE: The Republican leadership in Lansing has shown the first signs that the GOP is fed up with House candidate Steve Marino and his many damaging comments caught on tape. Once the nominee in a key targeted House seat in Macomb County that Republicans wanted to retain. It now appears that the party has cut the cord.
According to the Lansing-based MIRS news service, at a gathering on Tuesday of lobbyists and those associated with a a large multi-client lobbying firm, Rep. Aric Nesbitt, chair of the House GOP’s election strategy committee, said: “I’ll say this, if Steve Marino wins, you can thank straight-ticket voting.”
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Steve Marino, state House candidate and lobbyist, has been caught on tape again engaging in self-sabotage.
This time, audio recordings reveal his views on Social Security, and for the Republican Party, Marino’s comments are again cringeworthy.
The Harrison Township Republican told two senior citizens that the way to preserve Social Security is to boost the retirement age from the traditional 65 to 75.
“Right now the life expectancy for a female is 81, 79 1/2 for a male. I mean, make (the retirement age) 70, 75. That way people aren’t building it into their retirement plan,’” the Macomb County commissioner said at a coffee hour for constituents last year.
He added: “It (Social Security) was never meant to be built into your retirement plan. It was supposed to be there when your retirement plan failed.”
As with the other tapes released recently by the Michigan Democratic Party, this conversation at a St. Clair Shores coffee shop was secretly recorded by Dem campaign trackers. Except this time, the trackers were senior citizens. That didn’t stop Marino, 27, from spouting his view that Social Security should not kick in until shortly before death.
That point of view sounds especially bizarre when linked with a Marino viewpoint on a previous recording that seemed to indicate he supports child labor practices in some foreign countries – putting kids to work in factories at age 10 or 12.
What’s more, does Marino actually believe that when Social Security was enacted in 1935, during the depths of the Great Depression, that average Americans were engaged in retirement planning and building up stock portfolios?
Marino has established quite an ugly track record since he first ran for office and won in 2014. Among the comments he made during his 2015 conversations with voters, he said: outsourcing jobs to China is an effective means for corporations to avoid paying American wage rates; he engaged in a ploy to avoid paying part of his property tax bill on the lakefront home he bought from his father; and, as a lobbyist, he has paid big bar tabs racked up by state legislators.
Marino is running in November in the 24th House District (Harrison Township and parts of Clinton and Macomb townships) against Democrat Dana Camphous-Peterson, a former county commissioner.
Needless to say, the Democrats are already lining up campaign ads using his own words against him.
