A few weeks ago President Obama told an audience in Roanoke, Virginia:
“If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business—you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”
A perfectly unexceptional point, one would think, except the Romney campaign and its media accomplices leaped gleefully on one sentence (“If you’ve got a business—you didn’t build that.”) and yanked it out of context in an effort to suggest that Obama thought business owners didn’t have anything to do with the success of their own businesses.
Fox News went to cringe-inducing lengths to try to try to make that dubious point (although it at least forced them to show more of what Obama actually said).
It’s fairly rare for a successful business owner to actually acknowledge Obama’s point, but that’s what James C. Roumell has graciously done. Roumell, who grew up in a working-class family in Detroit and now owns a $300 million asset management firm, writes:
In 1967, Detroit’s riots came to our neighborhood and our dry cleaner was burned to the ground. The National Guard was called in, and peace was quickly restored. Mom found a good job with a trucking company and was able to adequately care for our family on a union wage fought for by the Teamsters in an environment supported by the National Labor Relations Act of 1935.
I went to college with the help of Pell Grants and government loans. Twenty years ago I met Claiborne Pell and was able to thank the former Democratic senator from Rhode Island for introducing the Higher Education Act of 1965, which allowed me to go to college.
…..
Of course, I worked hard. As a boy I delivered newspapers and cut grass. In high school I was a short-order cook, landscaper and factory worker. I entered the financial services industry in 1986, and in 1992 I struck out on my own with a new baby and little savings. I learned what a panic attack was, for sure.I did work harder, and perhaps more imaginatively, than many colleagues. But does that mean I built it myself? Does it diminish my success to be grateful for the public investments that so clearly contributed to my success? Every successful person knows, and will admit if he is honest, that luck played a role in his good fortune.
…..
Last year I paid 22.6 percent in federal taxes after all the special deductions afforded me. That’s a pretty darn low effective rate by historical standards, and it’s low for all I receive from this country. My business depends on a country that continues to make savvy investments in its infrastructure, in its oversight of industry and in its people. Those public investments are instrumental to private market growth.
With an attitude like that, Mr. Roumell won’t be appearing on Fox News or in Republican campaign ads any time soon.
