Saturday, October 26, 2013 6:52:25 PM
A Wife Committed to Cruz’s Ideals, but a Study in Contrasts to Him
Ted Cruz and his wife, Heidi Nelson Cruz, watching election results in Texas last year. Mrs. Cruz, a managing director at Goldman Sachs, keeps a low profile.
David J. Phillip/Associated Press
Mrs. Cruz at the Capitol shortly after her husband's election in 2012.
Harry Hamburg/Associated Press
Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. administered the Senate oath of office to Mr. Cruz as his family stood by. Mrs. Cruz lives in Houston with their daughters, Caroline, 5, and Catherine, 2.
Evan Vucci/Associated Press
Mrs. Cruz in 1990 as a freshman at Claremont McKenna College, where she majored in economics and international relations.
Office of Sen. Ted Cruz
Mr. Cruz thanked his wife after winning a longshot bid for the Republican Senate nomination in Texas on July 31, 2012 in Houston.
Johnny Hanson/Houston Cronicle, via Associated Press
Audios [embedded]
Heidi Cruz, in Her Own Words
Heidi Cruz and her husband, Senator Ted Cruz, spoke to The Times's Ashley Parker.
What's It Like Being Married to Ted Cruz? (0:48)
Morning Routine With Daughters (0:39)
The $1.2 Million Question (1:12)
By ASHLEY PARKER
Published: October 23, 2013
WASHINGTON — At first glance, Senator Ted Cruz’s wife, Heidi Nelson Cruz, seems to be just the sort of person the Tea Party supporters who celebrate her husband’s anti-establishment positions love to hate.
A vegetarian with a Harvard M.B.A., Mrs. Cruz is a managing director at Goldman Sachs, one of the Wall Street firms that helped set off the populist rage that ushered Mr. Cruz into the Senate in 2012. She works for Goldman in Houston, where she lives with the couple’s two young children, and as her husband’s fame has increased — depending on the audience, he is among the most pilloried or revered members of the Senate — she has maintained a low profile.
“I think it works really well for our family for us both to have careers, and I know what my commitments are to Goldman,” Mrs. Cruz, 41, said in an interview last week in her husband’s Senate office. “I think it’s also really good for our girls to have me at home with them.”
Yet the fallout from her husband’s role in the Congressional fiscal showdown this month did not spare Mrs. Cruz, one half of what she calls “a great team.” And it was the Democrats who seemed to be making her background an issue.
As her husband helped force a government shutdown over his opposition to President Obama’s health care law and argued that members of Congress and their staffs should be forced to buy insurance without any government contribution, the Democrats sensed an opening.
Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the Senate’s No. 2 Democrat, tried to push Mr. Cruz into admitting that he was on his wife’s blue-chip Goldman health plan — a sign of hypocrisy, he implied. And then Mrs. Cruz’s boss, Goldman’s chief executive, Lloyd C. Blankfein, turned up at the White House to urge against a devastating debt default, one of the issues with which Mr. Cruz had become closely associated.
“I have to say, honestly, I’m not involved with any of those issues at our firm,” Mrs. Cruz said. And if her husband was evasive about where he got his health coverage, Mrs. Cruz was blunt.
“Ted is on my health care plan,” said Mrs. Cruz, who has worked in Goldman’s investment management division for eight years.
Catherine Frazier, a spokeswoman for the senator, confirmed the coverage, which Goldman said was worth at least $20,000 a year. “The senator is on his wife’s plan, which comes at no cost to the taxpayer and reflects a personal decision about what works best for their family,” she said.
Mrs. Cruz, both personally and professionally, is a complex study in contrasts to her husband. She describes herself as instinctively collaborative, and her husband as a man of big, fearless ideas — a seemingly polite way of saying that, yes, Mr. Cruz breaks a few pieces of china every now and then.
“Ted is very much a visionary,” she said. “He is very strategic, and he’s very practical, and he does what needs to be done, not what everybody wants him to do.”
Of herself, she said: “I want to make sure that everybody is comfortable. I want to make sure that everybody is talking to each other.”
Those who know Mrs. Cruz say that she is less ideological than her husband. During the Bush administration, where she worked first in the United States trade representative’s office and later in the Treasury Department and on the National Security Council, she was known as more of an analytical thinker than a partisan zealot.
“Nothing in her background remotely approached Ted’s Scalia-like conservatism,” said P. Edward Haley, a professor of international strategic studies at Claremont McKenna College and one of Mrs. Cruz’s mentors, referring to Justice Antonin Scalia. “They’re alike in intensity — and they’re both extremely bright — and in conservative principles and ambition, but absent Ted, I don’t think Heidi would be moving in that particular branch of the Republican Party.”
Mrs. Cruz first met her husband in Austin, Tex., in 2000. He had his own elite academic credentials — Princeton and Harvard Law School — and both were young policy aides (she on the economic side, he on the domestic side) on George W. Bush’s presidential campaign.
Their first date was at a bar called the Bitter End, and it lasted for hours as her young suitor, Mrs. Cruz recalled with a laugh, “asked me a lot of questions about my background, my goals in life, my 10-year plan, my 20-year plan.
In Mr. Cruz’s telling, they met on Jan. 3 and began dating on Jan. 5. “I’m embarrassed it took me two days to ask her out to dinner,” he said.
They married the following May.
Mrs. Cruz was born in San Luis Obispo, Calif., to parents who were Seventh-day Adventist [ http://www.adventist.org/beliefs/ ; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seventh-day_Adventist_Church ] missionaries. She and her brother spent brief parts of their childhood in places like Nigeria and Kenya. But her own mission, she said, involved public service. She fell in love with politics on a family trip to Washington during the Reagan administration.
Julie Sweet, the general counsel at the consulting firm Accenture, who is a close friend of the Cruzes, said that “the way she always phrased it was people are called in different ways to serve.”
By the time she arrived at Claremont McKenna College in California, friends and professors knew her as a whip-smart economics and international relations double-major — she later graduated Phi Beta Kappa — and a driven and ambitious young woman who was already planning a professional career.
In Mr. Cruz, friends and colleagues say, she met not just her match, but also her intellectual equal.
“Heidi is a synthesizer, whereas Ted tends to blow ahead on one line of reasoning,” said Lawrence B. Lindsey, the chief economic adviser on Mr. Bush’s 2000 campaign. Mrs. Cruz pulled together “different points of view,” he said, and Mr. Cruz is “more of a hard-charger on one point of view.”
While Mrs. Cruz comes across as confident but gracious — she disarms by asking personal questions, and answers those put to her directly and candidly — her husband tends to filibuster. Still, when Mr. Cruz stopped by last week for the final 15 minutes of the interview, he often listened attentively, resting his cheek on his clasped hands as he gazed at his wife. She, meanwhile, occasionally cut him off with a joke or a quip.
When Mr. Cruz began talking about the early days of his long-shot Senate bid, recalling that he was polling at about 2 percent, Mrs. Cruz interjected, “Ted likes to say the margin of error was 3 percent!”
Although Mrs. Cruz said that she was less “issue driven” than her husband, she added that she was committed to him and his ideals.
“It’s allowed me to really support what he does, even politically,” she said, “because I know he’s doing it because he truly believes in it.”
On the night of her husband’s 21-hour speech on the president’s health care plan, she was out of town for work. (Though Mrs. Cruz says she is home most nights, the couple have a live-in nanny). But when Mr. Cruz’s chief of staff called and asked if she had any suggestions for a bedtime story he could read to their girls — Caroline, 5, and Catherine, 2 — from the Senate floor, she suggested “Green Eggs and Ham,” knowing it was her husband’s favorite.
After Mr. Cruz read the book, supporters of the health care law said Dr. Seuss had the same message as they did: that if you try something, you just might like it.
In a glimpse into their marriage that Mr. Cruz called “illustrative,” he recalled saying to his wife in the weeks before his Senate primary, when he was still behind in the polls, “Sweetheart, I’d like us to liquidate our entire net worth, liquid net worth, and put it into the campaign.”
“What astonished me, then and now, was Heidi within 60 seconds said, ‘Absolutely,’ with no hesitation,” said Mr. Cruz, who invested about $1.2 million — “which is all we had saved,” he added — into his campaign.
Mrs. Cruz’s Goldman colleagues and the company’s political action committee also did their part, giving more than $65,000, making them the campaign’s second-largest source of contributions.
Now, less than a year into his Senate term, the junior senator from Texas is prompting speculation about a possible White House run. His wife, meanwhile, seems to be well trained in the ways of message discipline.
Asked if she could see herself as first lady, Mrs. Cruz laughed.
“Um, I don’t think I should answer that,” she said.
Kitty Bennett contributed research.
© 2013 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/24/us/politics/a-wife-committed-to-cruzs-ideals-but-a-study-in-contrasts-to-him.html [ http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/24/us/politics/a-wife-committed-to-cruzs-ideals-but-a-study-in-contrasts-to-him.html?pagewanted=all ]
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For Heidi Cruz, Grapefruit Juice Was Key to Political Career
By ASHLEY PARKER
October 24, 2013, 2:44 pm
Heidi Nelson Cruz, the wife of Senator Ted Cruz of Texas [ http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/24/us/politics/a-wife-committed-to-cruzs-ideals-but-a-study-in-contrasts-to-him.html (above)] and a managing director at Goldman Sachs, has one piece of advice she often gives to the young graduates she mentors: Be the person willing to do whatever it takes to get the job done, no matter how small the task may seem.
Or, in shorthand, she tells them the Bob Zoellick story.
In 2000, fresh from working on George W. Bush’s first presidential campaign, Mrs. Cruz arrived in Florida to help out with the recount. A newly minted Harvard M.B.A. and eager to make herself useful, she approached Robert B. Zoellick, whom she knew slightly from the campaign, and asked what she could do to help.
“And he very seriously looked up from his desk and said that he wanted some grapefruit — grapefruit juice,” Mrs. Cruz recounted in an interview last week in her husband’s Senate office.
A bit miffed but undaunted, she grabbed the keys to the rental car from Mr. Cruz, then her boyfriend, and headed to the grocery store. “And I’ll admit, she was ticked,” Mr. Cruz said.
Mrs. Cruz bought the grapefruit juice, arranged it in an ice chest — “and it was beautiful,” she said — and left it on Mr. Zoellick’s desk with a Post-It note that read: “Per your request.”
“So the next day, I thought, O.K., you’ve got to prove yourself, he needed grapefruit juice, fine,” she remembered. “So I said, ‘Mr. Zoellick, if there’s anything that you need today, I’m here and I’d love to help, there’s a lot going on.’ ”
Mr. Zoellick’s next request was equally simple: “Raisin bread.”
“And I was not deterred,” Mrs. Cruz said. “I was like, Got it! Ran and got the key, do-do-do-do-do. Got it, put it on his desk.”
The next thing he asked her for was help with some talking points. And later, when he was appointed as the United States Trade Representative in Mr. Bush’s new administration, Mrs. Cruz received a late-night phone call: “He said, ‘You’re the first person I’m calling and I want you on my team,’ ” she said.
Indeed, Mrs. Cruz’s first job in the Bush White House was as a special assistant to Mr. Zoellick, who recently joined Goldman [ http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/10/07/zoellick-to-join-goldman-as-international-adviser/ ] as the chairman of its international advisory board.
So why, exactly, was Mrs. Cruz considered for the job? “The reason he said why is, he said, ‘Do you know for a week, I had been asking people for grapefruit juice and no one would get it for me?’,” Mr. Cruz recalled.
© 2013 The New York Times Company
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/24/for-heidi-cruz-grapefruit-juice-was-key-to-political-career/ [with comments]
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How Much Does Ted Cruz's Goldman Sachs Health Care Plan Cost Taxpayers?
By Dave Jamieson
Posted: 10/24/2013 3:27 pm EDT | Updated: 10/24/2013 3:41 pm EDT
WASHINGTON -- In an interview with The New York Times published Wednesday, Heidi Nelson Cruz, the wife of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), confirmed that the Senate's most famous Obamacare foe receives his health coverage through her job at Goldman Sachs [ http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/24/us/politics/a-wife-committed-to-cruzs-ideals-but-a-study-in-contrasts-to-him.html (first item this post)]. The value of the coverage, according to Goldman, is at least $20,000 per year.
Liberals, of course, relish the irony [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/25/ted-cruz-dick-durbin_n_3992395.html (fourth item at/see {linked in} http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=92413213 and preceding and following)] that a senator who enjoys high-end health coverage through an investment bank was also working to undermine a law aimed at extending coverage to the uninsured. Lest anyone call this hypocritical, a Cruz spokeswoman told the Times that the senator's Goldman plan "comes at no cost to the taxpayer."
Edward Kleinbard, former chief of staff on Congress’ Joint Committee on Taxation, says that's nonsense.
"Of course there's a cost to taxpayers," Kleinbard told HuffPost.
As with any family on employer-sponsored coverage [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/10/15/the-huge-health-care-subsidy-everyone-is-ignoring/ ], Heidi Nelson Cruz's health insurance essentially functions as untaxed income. Rather than pay her an additional $20,000 in salary, Goldman compensates her just as much through her health plan, which the Cruz family won't have to pay taxes on.
Assuming the Cruz family falls into the highest tax bracket -- generally a safe assumption for a Goldman managing director -- Kleinbard, like the economist Dean Baker [ http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/senator-cruzs-health-care-plan-costs-taxpayers-8000-a-year ], estimates that the $20,000 Goldman plan amounts to about $8,000 in taxes that the general public won't see.
"Instead of getting compensation in cash and then shopping for insurance, they're getting an $8,500 federal subsidy," Kleinbard said. "If Goldman said, 'Here's cash, go buy your own policy,' that would cost them $8,500 in federal taxes. By structuring it this way, Goldman has saved them $8,500."
"If we didn't allow the health care deduction they would get it in pay and then pay the top rate, plus Medicare tax on it," Baker noted in an email.
As Kleinbard has noted [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/10/15/the-huge-health-care-subsidy-everyone-is-ignoring/ ] before in his writings on the health care law, the Cruz family's windfall here is not unique. The same subsidy applies to anyone on employer-sponsored coverage -- whether it's Kleinbard himself or Huffington Post reporters like this one -- though the subsidy is larger with the gold-plated health plans commonly found on Wall Street.
Kleinbard told HuffPost that it infuriates him when politicians lambaste tax subsidies through Obamacare for less well-off Americans when those politicians -- and anyone on employer-sponsored insurance [ http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2012/03/obamacare_and_the_individual_mandate_penalizing_people_who_don_t_have_health_insurance_is_nothing_new_.html ] -- already enjoy their own kind of health care subsidies. The tax savings through Cruz's employer plan, he notes, is likely bigger than the typical subsidies under Obamacare. The estimated $8,500 is also more than twice [ http://kff.org/medicaid/state-indicator/medicaid-payments-per-enrollee/ ] the average annual Medicaid payment for an adult in Texas, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.
"For most people, in the Affordable Care Act, they're not getting federal subsidies as large as this," he said. "[Cruz] is the beneficiary of a large federal subsidy today, and while he's obtaining this he's not willing to make that available to lower-income, hard-working Americans who don't get health care."
Cruz's office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Copyright © 2013 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/24/ted-cruz-health-care_n_4157938.html [with embedded video report, and comments]
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(linked in):
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=13376053 and preceding and following;
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=93239998 and preceding and following
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=93284049 and preceding and following
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=93399913 and preceding and following
Ted Cruz and his wife, Heidi Nelson Cruz, watching election results in Texas last year. Mrs. Cruz, a managing director at Goldman Sachs, keeps a low profile.
David J. Phillip/Associated Press
Mrs. Cruz at the Capitol shortly after her husband's election in 2012.
Harry Hamburg/Associated Press
Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. administered the Senate oath of office to Mr. Cruz as his family stood by. Mrs. Cruz lives in Houston with their daughters, Caroline, 5, and Catherine, 2.
Evan Vucci/Associated Press
Mrs. Cruz in 1990 as a freshman at Claremont McKenna College, where she majored in economics and international relations.
Office of Sen. Ted Cruz
Mr. Cruz thanked his wife after winning a longshot bid for the Republican Senate nomination in Texas on July 31, 2012 in Houston.
Johnny Hanson/Houston Cronicle, via Associated Press
Audios [embedded]
Heidi Cruz, in Her Own Words
Heidi Cruz and her husband, Senator Ted Cruz, spoke to The Times's Ashley Parker.
What's It Like Being Married to Ted Cruz? (0:48)
Morning Routine With Daughters (0:39)
The $1.2 Million Question (1:12)
By ASHLEY PARKER
Published: October 23, 2013
WASHINGTON — At first glance, Senator Ted Cruz’s wife, Heidi Nelson Cruz, seems to be just the sort of person the Tea Party supporters who celebrate her husband’s anti-establishment positions love to hate.
A vegetarian with a Harvard M.B.A., Mrs. Cruz is a managing director at Goldman Sachs, one of the Wall Street firms that helped set off the populist rage that ushered Mr. Cruz into the Senate in 2012. She works for Goldman in Houston, where she lives with the couple’s two young children, and as her husband’s fame has increased — depending on the audience, he is among the most pilloried or revered members of the Senate — she has maintained a low profile.
“I think it works really well for our family for us both to have careers, and I know what my commitments are to Goldman,” Mrs. Cruz, 41, said in an interview last week in her husband’s Senate office. “I think it’s also really good for our girls to have me at home with them.”
Yet the fallout from her husband’s role in the Congressional fiscal showdown this month did not spare Mrs. Cruz, one half of what she calls “a great team.” And it was the Democrats who seemed to be making her background an issue.
As her husband helped force a government shutdown over his opposition to President Obama’s health care law and argued that members of Congress and their staffs should be forced to buy insurance without any government contribution, the Democrats sensed an opening.
Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the Senate’s No. 2 Democrat, tried to push Mr. Cruz into admitting that he was on his wife’s blue-chip Goldman health plan — a sign of hypocrisy, he implied. And then Mrs. Cruz’s boss, Goldman’s chief executive, Lloyd C. Blankfein, turned up at the White House to urge against a devastating debt default, one of the issues with which Mr. Cruz had become closely associated.
“I have to say, honestly, I’m not involved with any of those issues at our firm,” Mrs. Cruz said. And if her husband was evasive about where he got his health coverage, Mrs. Cruz was blunt.
“Ted is on my health care plan,” said Mrs. Cruz, who has worked in Goldman’s investment management division for eight years.
Catherine Frazier, a spokeswoman for the senator, confirmed the coverage, which Goldman said was worth at least $20,000 a year. “The senator is on his wife’s plan, which comes at no cost to the taxpayer and reflects a personal decision about what works best for their family,” she said.
Mrs. Cruz, both personally and professionally, is a complex study in contrasts to her husband. She describes herself as instinctively collaborative, and her husband as a man of big, fearless ideas — a seemingly polite way of saying that, yes, Mr. Cruz breaks a few pieces of china every now and then.
“Ted is very much a visionary,” she said. “He is very strategic, and he’s very practical, and he does what needs to be done, not what everybody wants him to do.”
Of herself, she said: “I want to make sure that everybody is comfortable. I want to make sure that everybody is talking to each other.”
Those who know Mrs. Cruz say that she is less ideological than her husband. During the Bush administration, where she worked first in the United States trade representative’s office and later in the Treasury Department and on the National Security Council, she was known as more of an analytical thinker than a partisan zealot.
“Nothing in her background remotely approached Ted’s Scalia-like conservatism,” said P. Edward Haley, a professor of international strategic studies at Claremont McKenna College and one of Mrs. Cruz’s mentors, referring to Justice Antonin Scalia. “They’re alike in intensity — and they’re both extremely bright — and in conservative principles and ambition, but absent Ted, I don’t think Heidi would be moving in that particular branch of the Republican Party.”
Mrs. Cruz first met her husband in Austin, Tex., in 2000. He had his own elite academic credentials — Princeton and Harvard Law School — and both were young policy aides (she on the economic side, he on the domestic side) on George W. Bush’s presidential campaign.
Their first date was at a bar called the Bitter End, and it lasted for hours as her young suitor, Mrs. Cruz recalled with a laugh, “asked me a lot of questions about my background, my goals in life, my 10-year plan, my 20-year plan.
In Mr. Cruz’s telling, they met on Jan. 3 and began dating on Jan. 5. “I’m embarrassed it took me two days to ask her out to dinner,” he said.
They married the following May.
Mrs. Cruz was born in San Luis Obispo, Calif., to parents who were Seventh-day Adventist [ http://www.adventist.org/beliefs/ ; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seventh-day_Adventist_Church ] missionaries. She and her brother spent brief parts of their childhood in places like Nigeria and Kenya. But her own mission, she said, involved public service. She fell in love with politics on a family trip to Washington during the Reagan administration.
Julie Sweet, the general counsel at the consulting firm Accenture, who is a close friend of the Cruzes, said that “the way she always phrased it was people are called in different ways to serve.”
By the time she arrived at Claremont McKenna College in California, friends and professors knew her as a whip-smart economics and international relations double-major — she later graduated Phi Beta Kappa — and a driven and ambitious young woman who was already planning a professional career.
In Mr. Cruz, friends and colleagues say, she met not just her match, but also her intellectual equal.
“Heidi is a synthesizer, whereas Ted tends to blow ahead on one line of reasoning,” said Lawrence B. Lindsey, the chief economic adviser on Mr. Bush’s 2000 campaign. Mrs. Cruz pulled together “different points of view,” he said, and Mr. Cruz is “more of a hard-charger on one point of view.”
While Mrs. Cruz comes across as confident but gracious — she disarms by asking personal questions, and answers those put to her directly and candidly — her husband tends to filibuster. Still, when Mr. Cruz stopped by last week for the final 15 minutes of the interview, he often listened attentively, resting his cheek on his clasped hands as he gazed at his wife. She, meanwhile, occasionally cut him off with a joke or a quip.
When Mr. Cruz began talking about the early days of his long-shot Senate bid, recalling that he was polling at about 2 percent, Mrs. Cruz interjected, “Ted likes to say the margin of error was 3 percent!”
Although Mrs. Cruz said that she was less “issue driven” than her husband, she added that she was committed to him and his ideals.
“It’s allowed me to really support what he does, even politically,” she said, “because I know he’s doing it because he truly believes in it.”
On the night of her husband’s 21-hour speech on the president’s health care plan, she was out of town for work. (Though Mrs. Cruz says she is home most nights, the couple have a live-in nanny). But when Mr. Cruz’s chief of staff called and asked if she had any suggestions for a bedtime story he could read to their girls — Caroline, 5, and Catherine, 2 — from the Senate floor, she suggested “Green Eggs and Ham,” knowing it was her husband’s favorite.
After Mr. Cruz read the book, supporters of the health care law said Dr. Seuss had the same message as they did: that if you try something, you just might like it.
In a glimpse into their marriage that Mr. Cruz called “illustrative,” he recalled saying to his wife in the weeks before his Senate primary, when he was still behind in the polls, “Sweetheart, I’d like us to liquidate our entire net worth, liquid net worth, and put it into the campaign.”
“What astonished me, then and now, was Heidi within 60 seconds said, ‘Absolutely,’ with no hesitation,” said Mr. Cruz, who invested about $1.2 million — “which is all we had saved,” he added — into his campaign.
Mrs. Cruz’s Goldman colleagues and the company’s political action committee also did their part, giving more than $65,000, making them the campaign’s second-largest source of contributions.
Now, less than a year into his Senate term, the junior senator from Texas is prompting speculation about a possible White House run. His wife, meanwhile, seems to be well trained in the ways of message discipline.
Asked if she could see herself as first lady, Mrs. Cruz laughed.
“Um, I don’t think I should answer that,” she said.
Kitty Bennett contributed research.
© 2013 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/24/us/politics/a-wife-committed-to-cruzs-ideals-but-a-study-in-contrasts-to-him.html [ http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/24/us/politics/a-wife-committed-to-cruzs-ideals-but-a-study-in-contrasts-to-him.html?pagewanted=all ]
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For Heidi Cruz, Grapefruit Juice Was Key to Political Career
By ASHLEY PARKER
October 24, 2013, 2:44 pm
Heidi Nelson Cruz, the wife of Senator Ted Cruz of Texas [ http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/24/us/politics/a-wife-committed-to-cruzs-ideals-but-a-study-in-contrasts-to-him.html (above)] and a managing director at Goldman Sachs, has one piece of advice she often gives to the young graduates she mentors: Be the person willing to do whatever it takes to get the job done, no matter how small the task may seem.
Or, in shorthand, she tells them the Bob Zoellick story.
In 2000, fresh from working on George W. Bush’s first presidential campaign, Mrs. Cruz arrived in Florida to help out with the recount. A newly minted Harvard M.B.A. and eager to make herself useful, she approached Robert B. Zoellick, whom she knew slightly from the campaign, and asked what she could do to help.
“And he very seriously looked up from his desk and said that he wanted some grapefruit — grapefruit juice,” Mrs. Cruz recounted in an interview last week in her husband’s Senate office.
A bit miffed but undaunted, she grabbed the keys to the rental car from Mr. Cruz, then her boyfriend, and headed to the grocery store. “And I’ll admit, she was ticked,” Mr. Cruz said.
Mrs. Cruz bought the grapefruit juice, arranged it in an ice chest — “and it was beautiful,” she said — and left it on Mr. Zoellick’s desk with a Post-It note that read: “Per your request.”
“So the next day, I thought, O.K., you’ve got to prove yourself, he needed grapefruit juice, fine,” she remembered. “So I said, ‘Mr. Zoellick, if there’s anything that you need today, I’m here and I’d love to help, there’s a lot going on.’ ”
Mr. Zoellick’s next request was equally simple: “Raisin bread.”
“And I was not deterred,” Mrs. Cruz said. “I was like, Got it! Ran and got the key, do-do-do-do-do. Got it, put it on his desk.”
The next thing he asked her for was help with some talking points. And later, when he was appointed as the United States Trade Representative in Mr. Bush’s new administration, Mrs. Cruz received a late-night phone call: “He said, ‘You’re the first person I’m calling and I want you on my team,’ ” she said.
Indeed, Mrs. Cruz’s first job in the Bush White House was as a special assistant to Mr. Zoellick, who recently joined Goldman [ http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/10/07/zoellick-to-join-goldman-as-international-adviser/ ] as the chairman of its international advisory board.
So why, exactly, was Mrs. Cruz considered for the job? “The reason he said why is, he said, ‘Do you know for a week, I had been asking people for grapefruit juice and no one would get it for me?’,” Mr. Cruz recalled.
© 2013 The New York Times Company
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/24/for-heidi-cruz-grapefruit-juice-was-key-to-political-career/ [with comments]
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How Much Does Ted Cruz's Goldman Sachs Health Care Plan Cost Taxpayers?
By Dave Jamieson
Posted: 10/24/2013 3:27 pm EDT | Updated: 10/24/2013 3:41 pm EDT
WASHINGTON -- In an interview with The New York Times published Wednesday, Heidi Nelson Cruz, the wife of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), confirmed that the Senate's most famous Obamacare foe receives his health coverage through her job at Goldman Sachs [ http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/24/us/politics/a-wife-committed-to-cruzs-ideals-but-a-study-in-contrasts-to-him.html (first item this post)]. The value of the coverage, according to Goldman, is at least $20,000 per year.
Liberals, of course, relish the irony [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/25/ted-cruz-dick-durbin_n_3992395.html (fourth item at/see {linked in} http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=92413213 and preceding and following)] that a senator who enjoys high-end health coverage through an investment bank was also working to undermine a law aimed at extending coverage to the uninsured. Lest anyone call this hypocritical, a Cruz spokeswoman told the Times that the senator's Goldman plan "comes at no cost to the taxpayer."
Edward Kleinbard, former chief of staff on Congress’ Joint Committee on Taxation, says that's nonsense.
"Of course there's a cost to taxpayers," Kleinbard told HuffPost.
As with any family on employer-sponsored coverage [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/10/15/the-huge-health-care-subsidy-everyone-is-ignoring/ ], Heidi Nelson Cruz's health insurance essentially functions as untaxed income. Rather than pay her an additional $20,000 in salary, Goldman compensates her just as much through her health plan, which the Cruz family won't have to pay taxes on.
Assuming the Cruz family falls into the highest tax bracket -- generally a safe assumption for a Goldman managing director -- Kleinbard, like the economist Dean Baker [ http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/senator-cruzs-health-care-plan-costs-taxpayers-8000-a-year ], estimates that the $20,000 Goldman plan amounts to about $8,000 in taxes that the general public won't see.
"Instead of getting compensation in cash and then shopping for insurance, they're getting an $8,500 federal subsidy," Kleinbard said. "If Goldman said, 'Here's cash, go buy your own policy,' that would cost them $8,500 in federal taxes. By structuring it this way, Goldman has saved them $8,500."
"If we didn't allow the health care deduction they would get it in pay and then pay the top rate, plus Medicare tax on it," Baker noted in an email.
As Kleinbard has noted [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/10/15/the-huge-health-care-subsidy-everyone-is-ignoring/ ] before in his writings on the health care law, the Cruz family's windfall here is not unique. The same subsidy applies to anyone on employer-sponsored coverage -- whether it's Kleinbard himself or Huffington Post reporters like this one -- though the subsidy is larger with the gold-plated health plans commonly found on Wall Street.
Kleinbard told HuffPost that it infuriates him when politicians lambaste tax subsidies through Obamacare for less well-off Americans when those politicians -- and anyone on employer-sponsored insurance [ http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2012/03/obamacare_and_the_individual_mandate_penalizing_people_who_don_t_have_health_insurance_is_nothing_new_.html ] -- already enjoy their own kind of health care subsidies. The tax savings through Cruz's employer plan, he notes, is likely bigger than the typical subsidies under Obamacare. The estimated $8,500 is also more than twice [ http://kff.org/medicaid/state-indicator/medicaid-payments-per-enrollee/ ] the average annual Medicaid payment for an adult in Texas, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.
"For most people, in the Affordable Care Act, they're not getting federal subsidies as large as this," he said. "[Cruz] is the beneficiary of a large federal subsidy today, and while he's obtaining this he's not willing to make that available to lower-income, hard-working Americans who don't get health care."
Cruz's office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Copyright © 2013 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/24/ted-cruz-health-care_n_4157938.html [with embedded video report, and comments]
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Greensburg, KS - 5/4/07
"Eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty."
from John Philpot Curran, Speech
upon the Right of Election, 1790
F6
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