Last edited Sun Oct 14, 2018, 04:06 PM - Edit history (2)
From Washington Post (having trouble linking it…)
Kevin McCarthy’s stint as a small-business entrepreneur
Fact Checker Analysis
By Glenn Kessler
February 2, 2018
“I opened my own deli, it was like Subway before Subway, even built the counter in my dad’s garage. And I did it for two years and I was pretty successful. I now had enough money that I could pay my whole way through college. … So I sold my business.”
— House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), interviewed by Gerald Seib of the Wall Street Journal, June 16, 2015
After the the Washington Post wrote yet another article (to add to all the articles in its own and other publications) lazily accepting McCarthy’s lifelong claims about his early history as a “small businessman,” a reader wrote in to provide evidence that he was wildly exaggerating (shall we say). While sucking at the government’s teat for nearly his entire adult life (first working for Congressman Bill Thomas), he has continuously lied about how much of a business owner he actually was, about when he started this short-lived business, about when he began his degree program at Cal State Bakersfield…and about other points of fact… in order to paint a more compelling (and inaccurate) picture of what really transpired. So, for the first time (it seems), the back story of “My Kevin” was subjected to some fact checking, and is as usual for the tall tales of these bottom feeders, it couldn’t withstand the scrutiny. (“My Kevin” is what the vile thing occupying the White House calls this lying sycophant.)
McCarthy started his college education at Bakersfield Junior College while living at home-- an education that was basically free, except for books. (Thanks to the damn government!) According to the Post, at this time, “He made money by going to car auctions in Los Angeles, bringing them back to Bakersfield and then flipping them to private buyers for a profit — a practice he acknowledges was probably illegal.” (And how much do you want to bet he didn’t pay taxes on those profits, either?)
Then McCarthy won $5000 in the California Lottery, and that’s when the myth-making began:
1. Even though the lottery didn’t start in CA until McCarthy was almost 21, he has continuously claimed he was 19 when he won… probably because it fits his bullshit narrative better.
On numerous occasions, McCarthy has described these events as taking place when he was 19. He even corrected Gerald Seib of the Wall Street Journal during a 2015 public event when Seib said he was 21 when he opened the deli. “No, no, I was 19,” McCarthy interrupted.
Numerous news stories have taken him at his word. But the California lottery started on Oct. 4, 1985, when McCarthy was four months shy of turning 21. The week McCarthy became majority leader, in August 2014, the biography on his website was changed to make it clear he was 21 when he opened the deli, but he still slips into old habits. “You know, I started my first business when I was 19 years old,” McCarthy said on the House floor on April 27, 2016.
2. He also says he invested in the stock market and made another 30% on his initial winnings, then decided to open a business, then sold it a couple of years later after having made enough to put himself through Cal State Bakersfield. At the time, Cal State was just $338 per quarter (damn government handouts, again!)—and he was living at home, and he had started out at a community college—so he didn’t really “need” to open a business to put himself though college, even without the lottery money… but with the lottery money, he could have easily attended without working at all. He now says the money allowed him to intern for Bill Thomas for free while in college, but again, the lottery winnings alone would have achieved that at that time in that place. (I know something about living at home and attending college in Bakersfield in roughly that era, since I did it, too, before transferring to Berkeley--with a few years in between; I also graduated from BHS, and my mother considers My Kevin and his wife and his mother to be good friends, though I was outta there before the two sandwich shop years.)
"I was successful enough to have enough money to pay my way through college. So, I sold my business because I wanted to finish college,” he said during the interview with [Chris] Wallace.
3. McCarthy’s fabled “business” was actually just a counter at his uncle and aunt’s yogurt shop, McCarthy’s Yogurt! According to a review in 1986 by Peter Tittl, the deli was “located in a corner of McCarthy’s Yogurt. … The full official name is Kevin O’s Delicatessen but that’s an exaggeration. The deli is only a counter and refrigerator in McCarthy’s [the yogurt store owned by his relatives] dining room.”
4. While McCarthy has often referred to his deli (counter) as “Subway before Subway” (with fresh baked bread), a Subway had opened in Bakersfield in 1984.
5. The Post reports: No ownership or sales records that can be located for a Kevin O’s Deli in Bakersfield, according to the California Department of Tax and Fee Administration… only a sellers permit can be found for a McCarthy’s Yogurt, owned by Patricia and Thomas McCarthy, with a start date of Nov. 11, 1982, and a closeout date of April 30, 1989… McCarthy said he paid his employees, not the yogurt shop, and he does not understand why there is no record of the business. He recalls vividly having to be prepared for unexpected food prep inspections. He also recalls spending $200 on a sign that the city made him take down after seven days.
6. McCarthy has frequently said he sold the deli after two years and used the money to go to Cal State, but according to school records, he started school in the winter quarter of 1987, just a year after the “business” opened, and then graduated in 1989.
7. My Kevin has gotten a lot of mileage out of that two years as a “businessman” with a counter in his relatives’ store (quotes aggregated in Post article):
In 2011, he told the Faith and Freedom Coalition Annual Conference: “It taught me about regulations; taught me about every person I hired, I paid as much Social Security as they did; taught me those challenges I never forgot.” He also mused during a House debate: “When I think back to those days of the risk I took, I wonder if in today’s environment, could I do the same? Unfortunately, the answer is no, I could not. I cringe at the thought of today, of the regulations, the challenges that small businesses face.” Or, as he put it in a newsletter to constituents: “It reminded me of when I operated Kevin O’s Deli, where I experienced one of the greatest challenges to running a small business: overregulation by government.”
“So at the end of the semester I decided I wasn’t going to go back to school. I took my money out of the market, refinanced my current car. I had about $15,000 to $20,000 then. And I went out to buy a franchise. But no one really sells a 19-year-old a franchise. So I didn’t stop with that and I created my own deli,” McCarthy told the City Club in Los Angeles in 2015.
“One thing I will say, my history of getting here might be different than a lot of the others,” McCarthy told other lawmakers during a House committee debate on financial reforms in 2009. “When I was 19 years old I started my first business, no financial institution was going to lend to me. I did it on credit cards. I did it with a financial entity even loaning me the money to buy the meat to sell [at] the deli, the icemaker and beyond.”
“As a former small-business owner — a deli here in Bakersfield — I know that there is risk involved in turning a new idea into a successful business. There is no reward without some risk. My small business, like many small businesses, was started on credit,” he said in a 2012 weekly Republican address.
“I’d gotten interested in politics at the deli,” he told Los Angeles Times in 2003. “If I just tried to put a sign outside my shop, a little guy would pull up from the city and give me a note saying I had to go get a permit.”
“Those lessons that I learned back at Kevin O’s Deli have never left me. The higher the taxes, the less you have to pay your employees and the less you have to invest in new businesses,” he said in 2011.
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