Sean O'Brien versus Senator

You are missing the precise reason i dont think hes necessarily a liar.

"When I made my company? I kept my salary down at about $50,000 a year"

Yet you and everyone calling him a liar keep citing his 2012 disclosures of 2012 salary.

He was born in '77, at age 20 he took over his dads buisness. Thats 1997, not 2012, so his verbiage is wrong, but youre calling him out on the wrong part of it, if you dont have 1997 financial disclosures to cite, you simply CANNOT say he's lying about the 50k when he started.

I dont get how you think im so soft on him or buisness owners, remember that it was I who threw you a bone at the beginning of this whole thing by ME bringing up that he was a lying sack of crap because HE didnt come in at the bottom, he took over a buisness at age 20.


Sack of crap? Yes, but attack him on things that ARE verifiably false, not BS based on not understanding how time works.

 

I'm calling him a liar because he is making a deliberately misleading statement.

 

You are betting on an unverifiable claim, at age 20 its POSSIBLE that he was doing all that, but I personally would wager at age 20 he didnt need to because his overhead was probably extremely low.


What i find actually interesting is what he is NOT being attacked on, he says in the clip that he paid well above the union wages, that should actually be verifiable information, but no one is taking the effort to do that, because its easier for "journalists" to ignore a 15 year gap as if it didnt exist.

He might have lied on that, BUT no one seems to want to take that on.


Heres one, in buying a truck and trailer and maintaining them after operating expenses i end up near 50k income, i live relatively modestly. BUT, in 4 years time with accelerated truck and trailer payments i now own a truck and trailer, (if we assumed they were brand new in todays dollars lets just call it 50k and 200k for the set) now i cash out, selling the truck and trailer for 140k (a sucker every minute right?) Am I now a liar for saying I only paid myself 50k a year?

Or at the end of that i instead do the same and buy a second truck and trailer, same price same terms, employ someone to drive it and continue to just draw 50k, does that make me evil? Lets assume i pay the employee 50k as well (which doesnt count the other 15-20k that i as an employer end up paying in workers comp, w2 etc etc, and maybe i can figure out economies of scale so that i get an extra 10k per year per truck)

Wheres the line for you? At what point am i a liar for saying i only paid myself 50k when i started? In the first 4 years, thats actually true, though i was building equity, after the 8th year i could be at 80k + equity


Neither herre nor there, but I personally have a loose "rule" of 4x which says top pay (normally owner/ceo) to the bottom pay peon within a company should be no greater than 4x. If lowest paid is 50k, i should earn max of 200k. Anything extra ought to go back to employees in form of bonuses, raises or company financial health. I also have a fairly jaded view of publicly traded companies, in my view, the stock market would benefit everyone the most by being outlawed. And selling the company is another thing im not thrilled with, assets can be sold, im not sure i like the idea of a company not being there for its own benefit (long term, that means it needs to support its workers, not pay outrageous investment penalties and be able to withstand hard times)

 

I find the misleading thing worthy of criticism myself, going so far as to call him a liar, fair enough but ONLY about the thing that is *provably* false/misleading.

 

Sorry but no. Once someone, anyone is caught outright lying you can't trust anything they have ever claimed. They need to prove thay are not lying again.
After all, they had no problem lying the first time.

 

The line for me is when total compensation from the company is over 4 times his "salary". I'm not talking about the increased value of the company, but actual money leaving the company's accounts and going into his. He claimed between $200,000 and $2,000,000 in unearned income from the plumbing business in addition to his $97,000 salary. He also listed more than $500,000 in cash equivalent investments. He might have inherited it, or his wife brought it into the marriage, I don't know and it's immaterial to me.

What matters is that he tried to portray himself as a man who only took a small salary in order to build a company that pays fair wages, fighting against a greedy union rep that is a parasite on the working man.