Wilbur Ross' Servants 'Ranting and Raving' Over Taxes

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- It's not me, it's the government, billionaire Wilbur Ross told his disgruntled servants.

"Our household help came to me ranting and raving: what had I done to their checks?" Ross said during a panel discussion hosted by Bloomberg last week.

The servants only noticed that their paychecks had gotten smaller, but they didn't realize it was due to an increase in payroll taxes that knocked about 2% off their take home pay, according to Ross, whose WL Ross & Co. turnaround firm is a unit of Invesco (IVZ).

"The politicians did a very good job hiding the ball, saying the only people whose taxes going up are the rich people, and it's obviously not true: every wage earner's taxes went up," Ross told the panel.

Ross, who supported Mitt Romney in the 2012 election, will need to confer with fellow plutocrat and Blackstone Group (BX) chief Steve Schwarzman, another Romney supporter, so they can get their message straight for 2016.

In a separate Bloomberg interview on Wednesday, Schwarzman said "everybody has to have skin in the game. A tax solution that hits one half of one percent of the people is almost announcing that 99 and a half percent of the people don't have a role to help fix our society."

So which is it, guys? Is the government screwing your servants or babying them?

-- Written by Dan Freed in New York.

Follow @dan_freed

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