One of the hoary cliches of the businessperson-turned-politico on the hustings is that she or he “has met a payroll” and thus is more prepared to meet the fiscal challenges of an organization than the pale, dweeby, permanently elected opponent over there.
And, you know what? It’s one of those truisms that’s really true.
Meeting a payroll certainly changed my way of looking at the way the world really works.
I was 28, a year out of graduate school with a degree in international management, and suddenly finding myself the business manager of a start-up company.
A weekly newspaper, if you must know. Terrible thing to be starting. Even then, when it wasn’t entirely crazy to imagine that one could make money in the print dodge, there were only two categories of start-ups the Small Business Administration had an absolute rule against loaning money to: restaurants, and newspapers.
Much-diminished, sold four or five times over the decades, the thing is still extant, so I guess it wasn’t absolutely nuts to start it up. Lots of bi-weekly payrolls met over those years.
I came to the job a few weeks after the company had been set up. Quickly found out, for instance, that while paychecks were indeed going out to a couple of dozen employees, the other founders had neglected to tell the IRS, and no income tax was being withheld from those checks. Little things like that. Had to go hat (and company checkbook) in hand down to talk to the unhappy feds and make amends.
We needed to have...
NEW DELHI: Assam chief minister Himanta Biswa Sarma on Monday alleged that the entire press conference conducted by Congress leaders Pawan Khera and Gaurav Gogoi was based on material supplied by ...