Business Owners, Employees and The Upcoming Election

Employee of the Month Reserved Parking Sign (Photo credits: myparkingsign.com)

From Owen Robinson at the Boots and Sabers blog about a CEO in Milwaukee and an email to his employees.

Milwaukee CEO Communicates with Employees About Election

Since this is an election phenomenon that has become local, let’s talk about it a little.

Mike White, the chairman and owner of Rite-Hite, a major Milwaukee manufacturer of industrial equipment, told employees in an email this week that all employees “should understand the personal consequences to them of having our tax rates increase dramatically if President Obama is re-elected, forcing taxpayers to fund President Obama’s future deficits and social programs (including Obamacare), which require bigger government.”

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“The tax rate we pay is not 17%, as Warren Buffett would have you believe; with state taxes it is roughly 45%. President Obama has announced that our planned tax rate would increase to roughly 65%, reducing our after tax income by 36% and dramatically reducing, if not eliminating, your and my RSP contributions.”
As a result, White said the company’s profits would not be reinvested. Instead, he wrote, “the money will be sent into the abyss that is Washington, D.C. So, on top of the burden of having your personal taxes increase dramatically, which they will, your RSP contributions and healthy retirement are also at risk, all for the sake of maintaining an over-sized government that borrows 42% of every dollar it spends.”

First, it should be understood that government policies have real consequences on people and businesses. If business taxes go up, that’s real cash leaving a business that they can’t use on other things. This isn’t Monopoly. It’s real life.

Second, the Left seems to be in an uproar about the relatively new phenomenon of business owners telling their employees what the ramifications of an election may be on the business, but the same Left has been silent for a generation when union bosses do the exact same thing.

Third, isn’t it the duty of a business owner to be honest with their employees about things like this? If the owner seriously thinks that the election results will really impact folks’ jobs,shouldn’t they say so? If a business owner fired a bunch of people after an election because of his anticipation of the market, wouldn’t that owner rightly be criticized for not giving any warning? Here again we see the Left putting business owners in a box in which they can’t win. They can’t be honest about how the election results might affect their business and they can’t respond accordingly when those results are known.

Boots and Sabers.