Posted on 11/30/2013 11:16:07 AM PST by SeekAndFind
As America struggles with high unemployment and record inequality, everyone is offering competing solutions to the problem. In this war of words (and classes), one thing has been repeated so often that many people now regard it as fact.
"Rich people create the jobs."
Specifically, by starting and directing America's companies, entrepreneurs and rich investors create the jobs that sustain everyone else.
This statement is usually invoked to justify cutting taxes on entrepreneurs and investors. If only we reduce those taxes and regulations, the story goes, entrepreneurs and investors can be incented to build more companies and create more jobs.
This argument ignores the fact that taxes on entrepreneurs and investors are already historically low, even after this year's modest increases. And it ignores the assertions of many investors and entrepreneurs (like me) that they would work just as hard to build companies even if taxes were higher.
But, more importantly, this argument perpetuates a myth that some well-off Americans use to justify today's record inequality — the idea that rich people create the jobs.
Entrepreneurs and investors like me actually don't create the jobs -- not sustainable ones, anyway. Yes, we can create jobs temporarily, by starting companies and funding losses for a while. And, yes, we are a necessary part of the economy's job-creation engine. But to suggest that we alone are responsible for the jobs that sustain the other 300 million Americans is the height of self-importance and delusion.
So, if rich people do not create the jobs, what does?
A healthy economic ecosystem — one in which most participants (especially the middle class) have plenty of money to spend.
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
A healthy economic ecosystem — one in which most participants (especially the middle class) have plenty of money to spend.
The guy makes a salient point and then proceeds to ignore it.
What makes for a healthy economy that has the capability to create jobs for the middle class that he asserts are the engine of growth?
Most important for a growing economy is a stable and rational government in my opinion; Something sorely lacking in US today.
Instead we have a government that in the middle of a recession decides that in an opportune time to radically change the regulations on an industry that represents on third of the economic activity of the nation.
Instead we have a government that has unleashed the zealots of regulatory branch of the executive branch to produce onerous new regulations that close power plants and increase the cost of doing business for every industry in the country.
At a time when government should be making it easier for business to grow and cheaper for businesses to create jobs our government is making it more expensive to create jobs and more difficult to start a new business.
What kind of environment makes job creation possible? An environment where job creators feel safe to invest in new projects with out the fear that the government will not jump out of the shadows with some new regulation or tax that will make their investment unprofitable.
Second, as Hanauer observes, America's richest entrepreneurs, investors, and companies now have so much money that they can't possibly spend it all. So instead of getting pumped back into the economy, thus creating revenue and wages, this cash just remains in investment accounts.
Hey ditzy what is done with the money in those investment accounts?
I consider anything that I do bother to read in BI with extreme skepticism as the editor in chief is a left winger.
Birds of a feather and all that.
FT is a non-Brit bashing view of the business and financial world.
Strange, in 50+ years working I never worked for any poor people, only rich ones.
Excellent personal example that shows just how big of a moron the author is. Since I used it to make a similar point up the thread, your chicken/egg comment is right on point, too.
The Walmart family bought GT40 sn 1075 right from the Ford Museum. Only car to win Le Mans twice.
I’d call that rich.
Your most accurate post really illustrates the absurdity of the clown’s, (author), positions.
Yup.
leftists deny logic and reality every time
The power of self-rationalization and justification of left-wingers is spellbinding. It doesn’t matter how many times it is proven to them, historically proven them, flesh and blood w/ human cost all around proven to them, that they and their cockamamie mindset are UTTERLY, 100%, destructively, miserably, bloodcurdlingly wrong, they go on beating their drumroll like a good jamboree man on mastas’ plantation and not listen. There is no way to get sucked into their arguments. They’ll never admit anythings. They are the living-deads.
There was a point where I worked for a 1,000 person company which had started twenty years prior as a family business operating out of the founder's home.
Henry Ford who founded the car company did create jobs and became rich. His 3d & 4th generation descendants, who live off of trust funds of his original wealth, don’t create jobs. That is the difference this blogger doesn’t recognize.
Total bullish*t.
The top rates were higher in the past, but the income brackets were set so high that there were very few paying them.
Today there are far more people paying much greater percentage of their income than during the years of 'higher tax rates' the liberals love to cite.
Apple started in a bedroom on a bed.
The reason they don’t do it; is control. The ruling class invents a way to control the population.
People like Reagan and Palin are seen as capable as truly rolling back the tide and threatening their hold on power. That’s why the bitter hatred of those two.
He probably sucks at that too and cheats when he plays.
So, if rich people do not create the jobs, what does? A healthy economic ecosystem -- one in which most participants (especially the middle class) have plenty of money to spend.I didn't go to the original to find out what the writer's punchline is -- but if it isn't "but the Obama administration wanted and got higher taxes (not to mention Obamacare, a huge financial burden) on the middle class,", then he's just a shill. Since he used the term "economic ecosystem", what do you suppose the odds are?
A great chart would be to graph the total tax bill paid by Americans as a percentage of income. All taxes and government fees including what is paid through backdoor ways.
Graph that back 150 years or so.
Socialism is a form of institutional amnesia, in which propaganda is employed to destroy the link in people’s minds between ownership, on the one hand, and society’s recognition of valuable labor which caused society to recognize it with ownership (of, e.g., money or a business).The one certain thing about how businesses get built is that socialists don’t build them. Socialists are far too busy arrogating to themselves credit for work which they have not done, and have not the art to do even if they tried.
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