While monitoring the MTGU twitter feed I came across a retweet from one of our followers to a story from the Drudge Report regarding David Siegel, founder and CEO of real estate company Westgate Resorts. The general thrust of the letter Mr. Siegel wrote to his employees was that if Barack Obama is re-elected and follows through with raising taxes on the wealthiest that he will fire people. He prefaces this threat by saying, “Of course, as your employer, I can’t tell you whom to vote for, and I certainly wouldn’t interfere with your right to vote for whomever you choose.” He then goes on to say he’s basically going to fire them if Obama wins. Hmm, sounds a lot like a threat to me and an attempt to coerce his employees to vote the way he wants them to vote. A real patriot, Mr. Siegel is, eh?
Mr. Siegel, whose company is one of the largest privately held timeshare organizations in the world, is a great example of what is wrong with the corporate money-grubbing douchebags currently holding themselves up as industry titans. Mr. Siegel owns a $60 million home in Orlando in the neighborhood Tiger Woods used to live in and has a private jet. The point being that the man does not have to worry about finances. I’m not knocking him for his ability to afford these objects. He clearly has worked hard and created a business empire, something I have no qualms with. What I do have qualms with is Mr. Siegel attempting to coerce his employees to subjugate their own voting interests in favor of his vast wealth.
Conservatives, especially the wealthy one’s, like to get their magic underwear all knotted up over the issue of class warfare. It’s just so evil and un-American that stuff; unless it serves their agenda (The same thing can be said about the deficit and entitlements and big government). Bill O’Reilly once said that if you taxed him more then he wouldn’t have the incentive to continuing working on every front that he patrols and that he would have to stop doing one of them and people would lose jobs. So basically, Mr. O’Reilly, much like Mr. Siegel, could give two shits about the welfare of their employees. God-forbid either man has to take a small cut in their yearly bake sale haul! What, my tax rate went up slightly? People will lose jobs over this, especially those horrendous janitors!
Look if you’re business is failing then yeah you have to fire people to continue operating, I get that, but when you are talking about your personal haul from your successful business shrinking a little bit while your company continues to thrive, then you’re just being a dick.
Mr. Siegel continues using one of the stats that I loathe when I hear it from folks like him: “The fact is, if I deducted 50% of your paycheck you’d quit and you wouldn’t work here. I mean, why should you? Who wants to get rewarded only 50% of their hard work? Well, that’s what happens to me.”
Well, that fact is Mr. Siegel, the government doesn’t take 50% of your paycheck. Not even close. Folks in Mr. Siegel’s tax bracket pay about 21.1% of their income in federal taxes and another 7.9% of their income in state taxes. So let’s do some simple math here:
21.1% + 7.9%= 29%
Not even close to 50%, as a matter of fact it’s much closer to half of 50%. Folks in my tax bracket pay out about 25.2% of their income to federal and state taxes. Just to be clear, there is no group in this country that pays 50% of their income to federal and state governments, not since the Reagan tax reform of 1986. Yes Mr. Siegel pays 4% more of his income in taxes as compared to me, but he also brings in 100 times more than I make before taxes after he pays on his taxes.
What does this all mean? It means that Mr. Siegel is a worthless greedy son-of-a-bitch who would rather send his employees out into the street than take a cut in his accounts. It means he is a rotten human being who has no real concern for people. It means he is a corrupt soul and a perfect example of what is wrong with this country. He is the type that Jesus Christ would toss out of the temple. This Randian philosophy of makers and takers is crude, wrong, and immoral. It rejects the existence of millions of people who work hard and deserve some sense of security in their lives even if they don’t run a billion dollar operation.
Greed has always played a part in business. That’s the nature of it. Most small business owners still have the right level of greed. They want to make money, that’s the point, but they also want to grow a business that they can be proud of when it’s all said and done. The one’s who are able to hire some employees and help their local economy are grateful that they’ve been able to help people’s lives. It seems to me that folks like Mr. Siegel are only concerned with the bottom line. Only your legacy is left in the afterlife, all of those dollar bills aren’t worth shit when you’re dead.
Here’s a link to where I got those tax numbers from:
take a leap