Health & Fitness
Who Really are the Job Creators?
Taxing the rich to make middle class investments that make the middle class grow and thrive is the single shrewdest thing we can do for the middle class, for the poor, and for the rich.
[Paraphrased transcript from Seattle Venture Capitalist Nick Hanauer]
Rich people don’t create Jobs. Nor do businesses large or small.
Jobs are a consequence of a circle-of-life-like feedback loop between customers and businesses. And only consumers can set in motion this virtuous cycle of increasing demand and hiring.
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That’s why when business people take credit for creating jobs, it’s a little bit like squirrels taking credit for creating evolution. It’s actually the other way around.
Anyone whose ever run business knows that hiring more people is a course of last resort for capitalists. It’s what [they] do if and only if rising consumer demand requires it.
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In this sense, an ordinary consumer is more of a job creator than a capitalist.
That’s why our existing policies are so upside down. When the biggest tax exemptions and lowest tax rates benefit the richest — all in the name of job creation — all that happens is that the rich get richer.
If it was true that lower taxes for the rich and more wealth for the wealthy led to job creation, today we would be drowning in jobs.
And yet employment and under-employment is at record highs.
Another reason this idea [that tax breaks for the wealthy creates jobs] is so wrong-headed is that there can never be enough super-rich people to power a great economy.
[A rich person] makes hundreds or thousands of times as much as the median American, but [they] don’t buy hundreds or thousands of times as much stuff.
We’ve had it backwards for the last 30 years. Rich people don’t create jobs.
Jobs are a consequence of an eco-systemic feedback loop between customers and businesses. And when the middle class thrives, businesses grow and hire and owners profit.
That’s why taxing the rich to pay for investments that benefit all is such a fantastic deal for the middle class and the rich.
In a capitalist economy, the true job creators are middle class consumers. And taxing the rich to make middle class investments that make the middle class grow and thrive is the single shrewdest thing we can do for the middle class, for the poor, and for the rich.
