Candidate Obama Stole My Job, President Obama Won't Give It Back

Higher taxes = dead startups.

I started working for a startup in November, 2007.  The boss had a good idea, but he didn't have enough money to develop the product.  He got a rich investor to cover the development costs which everybody thought would take two years.  So we started working.

The investor gave my boss payroll money through November 15, 2008, but not a penny after that.

What happened?  Why walk away from a half-done project which still looks like a good market?

I'll tell you what happened: President Barack Hussein Obama happened.

This is real, real simple.  A rich guy invests because he has money, but he wants more, he's greedy like everybody else.  Our rich guy gave my boss some of his money so my boss could develop a product to sell.

The rich guy planned to get back more money than he put in.  That's how people with money get more money - they invest, which means a business hires people to do the work, and the investors hope to make a profit down the road.

Why did my boss' investor walk away?  Because when he was a candidate, Mr. Obama said capital gains taxes were too low and he planned to raise them.  Mr. Obama thinks it's wrong for investors to keep so much profit from their investments, he wants government to take more of it away.

We have the highest capital gains taxes and business taxes in the developed world.  Some countries have 0% capital gains tax!  That's right, zero!

Those governments are smart enough to know that it's real, real hard to start a business which creates jobs and income taxes.  Any business that creates jobs gives the government plenty of money though employee income tax.

The government doesn't need to take money from investors who made the business possible and make jobs like mine possible.  They already take plenty when the money's paid out to employees.  I pay income taxes on every dime whether the business makes money or not.

Mr. Obama knows that.  He said he knew that raising capital gains taxes means that government gets less money.  In one of the debates, he said he wanted to raise capital gains taxes anyway in the name of "fairness" even if the government would get less tax money.

What is he smoking?  Does he think I give a rat's patoot whether it's fair that my boss makes more money than I do?  Does he think I give a rip if the rich guy who created my job in the first place makes more money than I do?

All the guys working on the new product are all unemployed, thanks to what Mr. Obama said about raising taxes.

Mr. Obama may think it's fair to take away so much money that the rich guy stops investing and kills our jobs, but we don't like it, not at all.

If wiping out our jobs is Mr. Obama's idea of "fair," he can shove fairness where the sun don't shine.  I can live with my having a job making a rich guy richer.  The richer my job makes him, the more profit the business has, the more secure my job is.

When my boss' investor figured whether giving my ex-boss money would make him more money back in 2007, he figured what he would keep after paying capital gains tax.  Where the tax was then, he'd get an acceptable return on his investment.

When Mr. Obama said he'd raise the capital gains tax and didn't say how much, our investor kept investing.  He met the Nov. 15 payroll.  He hoped Americans would realize that raising taxes would kill jobs and vote against Mr. Obama, but they didn't.

Mr. Obama won on Nov. 20 and my job disappeared immediately.

Candidate Obama stole my job by mouthing off about "fairness."

Mr. Obama is from Chicago, he should know all about greed.  Union guys didn't support him because they're nice, they supported him because they're greedy.

Unions have lost millions of members over the last decades because most workers look at unionized GM, Ford, and Chrysler.  They look at non-union car makers and know that unions are bad for jobs.

Unions hope Mr. Obama will pass a law so their goons can put pressure on people to sign cards to get a union in places there is no union.  When they get a union, they force workers to pay dues to the union.

Union bosses want more dues money!  They're greedy!  Nothing wrong with greed if your greed creates jobs - but instead of creating jobs, unions want to make workers more expensive.  Jobs will go away just like my job went away and just like Detroit jobs already went away.

Mr. Obama knows unions spent their stolen dues money electing him.  They invested in him and they expect to make a profit by forcing people who don't want a union to pay union dues.

So far, they're getting their profit.  Mr. Obama talks about stimulating the economy and creating jobs.  What's he really doing?  The stimulus law is just about all political payoff!

They're going to throw our tax money at unionized public schools to pay back the unions that elected Mr. Obama.  They're going to throw our tax money at bankrupt car companies to keep union jobs going and keep those dues rolling in.

They're going to throw our money at new energy so they can shut down old energy, but we barely have enough energy now.  New energy is going to cost a lot of investment, we will have no more energy than we have now, and we'll pay a lot more for it.

How does boosting energy prices help the economy?  It helps the union hardhats who build the new power plants and tear down the old ones, but you and me will pay, and pay, and pay.

Is any money going for investment in real, permanent, profitable jobs that pay more in taxes than they eat?  There is talk about cutting payroll tax so employees will spend more money, but there isn't anything about making investment more profitable except for cutting taxes Hollywood pays on movie profits.

Why cut Hollywood taxes?  Because rich Hollywood guys supported Mr. Obama's campaign and need a return on their investment in electing him , that's why.

Unions and Hollywood wouldn't invest in him if they didn't think he'd pay them off with our money.  I got news for President Obama.

My boss' investor is just as greedy as the union guys and the Hollywood guys.  He won't invest unless he thinks he'll make a profit and he thinks government will let him keep enough of the profit to be worth the trouble.

If government's going to tax away the profit, why bother to create jobs?  Better to sit on the money he already has and let me starve.

If President Obama wants businesses to create jobs, he's going to have to make it profitable to create jobs.  Investors won't invest in a business unless they see a profit any more than unions will invest in a politician unless they see a profit.

The difference is that President Obama pays the unions off with tax money people don't want to pay.  Business investors earn money and create jobs by selling products people want to buy.

Candidate Obama stole my job by talking about taking away all the profit my job would have earned for the investor.

If he really wants to create jobs, what about saying there would be no tax on gains from investments made in 2009?  No tax on gains if you bought a house in 2009, no tax if you profited from an investment in 2009.

That would interest my boss' rich friend; our product is still a good idea.  President Obama could create a lot of jobs by dropping the capital gains tax, but he says that wouldn't be "fair."

Me, I'd rather have a job, but our President won't give my job back by letting businesses create jobs.  He's pouring our money into unproductive government make-work "jobs" instead.

Nuts.

This article was submitted by a consultant whose career has been mostly spent working with startup companies.  Read other Scragged.com articles by Guest Editorial or other articles on Economics.
Reader Comments
There appear to be two Obama administrations. There is one that pretends to be rational and serving the American people. The other is dedicated to destroying the free-enterprise system and moving us into total socialism.

Once the U.S. is socialized, the leader who accomplished that can then move on to leading the entire world into socialism. Remember Berlin and the "People of the World" speech?

This guy is a whole lot more committed to pursuing socialism than many think. The stimulus package is one big step in that direction.

February 11, 2009 8:35 AM
I can very much identify with the author. Our business is about dried up. We have work for maybe 2-3 weeks more. Then it's done. Gone. Nothing new is coming in the door. Before the election we had enough business forecast to get us through the first half of 2009. Today, all of that is gone. Projects put on hold or evaporated. The businesses upon which our business depends are frozen--they don't know what to do so the safest thing to do is nothing.

The most successful stimulus bill congress could pass would be very short:

2009 & 2010: Capital Gains Taxed at 10%
Income Taxes: Cut rates across the board 50%
Payroll Taxes: Cut the "employer share" for 2009 & 2010. This would be a 50% reduction and provide additional funds to retain or hire new workers. Individuals wouldn't see a direct benefit, except that the still have a job.
Drill here, drill now in ANWR and other places we have oil.

That's it.
February 11, 2009 10:26 AM
Look again at the stimulus bill. There's nothing there for alternate energy, despite the $54 billion price tag. There is $32 billion for retrofitting the existing grid with "smart technology", there is $6 billion for additional winterization programs, and there...drum roll...$16 billion in TAX CREDITS for alt.energy companies and new startups. A tax credit is not an overt expenditure - it's a negative - it's failing to collect a tax that it collects from every other industry. But in their perverted thinking, they call it "cost to government" as though all the nation's wealth belongs to them to begin with. The government can decide which industries qualify for the credit and which do not - more politics, anyone?
February 11, 2009 11:51 AM
great piece. i've had a similar experience.
February 11, 2009 11:56 AM
This article starts from a faulty premise.

Candidate Obama said (I heard it at the speech in St Louis which I recorded, so I know he said this) that he was going to ELIMINATE capital gains taxes for investments in STARTUPS.

So your rich investor had another reason for pulling the plug. Maybe he thought you guys sucked and couldn't really develop a product?

February 11, 2009 1:40 PM
Space cynice: Where's the cut in the stimulus package?
February 11, 2009 2:04 PM
If space cynice can find a transcript where he said THAT, I'll send it to the boss so he can show it to the investor.
February 11, 2009 2:05 PM
I just got a call from a client. It seems that the one small job that came through has just been on hold. Why? The bank.

The bank is very skittish and are looking to over collateralize the loan. They want more collateral than the project is worth. This is stimulus?

So, our client has to go looking for another bank, or not do the project until lending practices return to normal.

And today is the day after the stimulus package compromise was reached.
February 12, 2009 10:11 AM
I agree that it seems foolish to tax cap gains from investments in startups, but taxing cap gains from people who are making millins of dollars a year trading stocks and other financial instruments doesn't seem totally out of line.

On a separate note: what's your beef with alternative energy? If energy prices go up, it's because producing energy a way that won't destroy the planet COSTS MORE than producing energy in a way that does destroy the planet. Part of the point is that the reason energy is currently so cheap is because the market is essentially totally ignoring the environmental cost of producing energy by burning fossil fuels. Some day we'll have to start paying that price, and I'd rather pay for it in dollars than in having an unlivable planet.
August 2, 2009 7:14 PM
My beef, J, with alternative energy is that everyone simply ASSUMES that our current ways of making energy will destroy the planet. Unfortunately for the scam artists who seek to profit by taxing away our right to use our present lower-cost energy technologies, their consensus is coming unglued.

Mars, for example, is getting warmer because the concentration of methane in the atmosphere is going up. Does that prove that mars is inhabited? Or that climate change is not necessarily man-made?

The longer and longer it stretches out, the more the "leading voices" of science are backing the opposition. You may have read about Dr. Plimus. He's a big shot geologist in Australia. He thinks climate change has nothig to do with the activities of mankind or if there is relation, it's too small to make a difference.


http://www.canada.com/technology/Global+warming+religion+First+World+urban+elites/1835847/story.html

August 3, 2009 3:15 PM
We cannot keep going in the same direction mr. Guest. It makes no sense to argue against man-made climate change, not ONLY because you would have to be an idiot to think that people aren't affecting the world in a negative way(not just by means of polution, or use of folsil fuels). this needs to change, no matter what a few scientists say. Greem technology is the way of a sustainable future, stop fighting that with no real reasoning.
March 20, 2010 2:38 PM
Add Your Comment...
4000 characters remaining
Loading question...