Posted 11:20 pm Sunday, July 22, 2012
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Yes, I Did, July 22
President Obama said, “You didn't build that,” speaking of my private business. He is wrong and doesn't have a clue about what it takes to create a private business. Furthermore, he is hostile to business and appears not to want to know how real productive jobs are created. Here's how: I got out of college in 1958 and couldn't get a job in geology, my major. So I took a job selling fences door to door. I got a job on a drilling rig working the grave yard shift as a mud logger and lived in a house trailer. I finally got an entry job at a small oil company and learned their business.
Finally I took the risk and started my own company, working seven days a week, holidays and many times all night. I found oil and gas for my investors and put my earnings back into the business. I hired secretaries, bookkeepers, gaugers, land men, attorneys, drillers, construction crews, surveyors and on and on. I prospered and created wealth and jobs for an endless number of people by paying salaries, buying equipment, services, paying state production taxes, county oil property taxes, income taxes and “windfall” profit taxes. Yes I paid more than my fair share. Keep in mind that every dollar I made was new money — it did not come out of someone else's pocket — it was new money found by the discovery of new oil and gas that had laid there millions of years until I worked out the details of where it was and drilled to find it.
Today, none of the above can happen under President Obama's leadership and policies. No, government did not help me succeed; it hindered me with excessive taxes and ever increasing senseless regulations and restrictions to the point I dissolved my companies and quit working and creating jobs. The one essential thing government does is enforce our Constitution and keep me free — and lately it is not even doing that. Obama should join me in retirement and we can discuss these problems further.
Harry Bergman
Frankstom
Finally I took the risk and started my own company, working seven days a week, holidays and many times all night. I found oil and gas for my investors and put my earnings back into the business. I hired secretaries, bookkeepers, gaugers, land men, attorneys, drillers, construction crews, surveyors and on and on. I prospered and created wealth and jobs for an endless number of people by paying salaries, buying equipment, services, paying state production taxes, county oil property taxes, income taxes and “windfall” profit taxes. Yes I paid more than my fair share. Keep in mind that every dollar I made was new money — it did not come out of someone else's pocket — it was new money found by the discovery of new oil and gas that had laid there millions of years until I worked out the details of where it was and drilled to find it.
Today, none of the above can happen under President Obama's leadership and policies. No, government did not help me succeed; it hindered me with excessive taxes and ever increasing senseless regulations and restrictions to the point I dissolved my companies and quit working and creating jobs. The one essential thing government does is enforce our Constitution and keep me free — and lately it is not even doing that. Obama should join me in retirement and we can discuss these problems further.
Harry Bergman
Frankstom
