I have started or helped start

basic thesis: I have started or helped start, dozens of businesses and initially hired lots of people. But if no one could have afforded to buy what we had to sell, my businesses would all have failed and all those jobs would have evaporated. That s why I can say with confidence that rich people don t create jobs, nor do businesses, large or small. What does lead to more employment is 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. In this sense, an ordinary middle-class consumer is far more of a job creator than a capitalist like me. Indeed, as Hanauer goes on to point out, even when businesses do well, they try their best to not create new jobs – because more jobs means higher labor costs and lower profits. Anyone who s ever run a business knows that hiring more people is a capitalist s course of last resort, something we do only when increasing customer demand requires it. In this sense, calling ourselves job creators isn t just inaccurate, it s disingenuous. Again, this isn’t a shocking notion. It’s a central fact of the economy. Indeed, the refusal of profitable businesses to start hiring again in earnest is one of the reasons job creation has been so anemic over the past several years. Of course, Hanauer moves from these less-than-earthshattering theses to draw a conclusion that might offend some rich people and/or Republicans. [O]ur current policies are … upside down. When you have a tax system in which most of the exemptions and the lowest rates benefit the richest, all in the name of job creation, all that happens is that the rich get richer. Since 1980, the share of income for the richest Americans air wedge has more than tripled while effective tax rates have declined by close to 50%. If it were true that lower tax rates and tech 2 scan tool more wealth for the wealthy would lead to more job creation, then today we would be drowning in jobs. And yet unemployment and under-employment is at record highs.