Saturday, August 6, 2011

Taxing the job creators

The latest rhetoric about taxing the job creators could not be more backwards. We don’t tax people when they create jobs. We never have, and we never will.

If you earn a million dollars, and you put that million dollars into paying people for their work, then we don’t tax that million dollars. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a person or a corporation: you don’t pay taxes on the money you pay for salaries and benefits, for training, for overhead, for providing people with a place to work and tools to work with. Every dollar you put into creating jobs is not taxed.

Raising taxes on the superwealthy only affects them if they DON’T create jobs. If the superwealthy are supposed to be job creators, let’s treat them better when they create jobs and let’s treat them worse when they don’t create jobs. The higher the tax rate, the more incentive they have to create jobs. Instead, we’ve lowered their tax rate, which means we’ve reduced their incentive to create jobs.

So the next time someone cries about raising taxes on the job creators, remember that those job creators are continuing to fail us, are continuing to NOT CREATE JOBS, and therefore deserve all the taxes we could possibly imagine. The moment the superwealthy want to stop paying taxes, they can do it very simply by creating jobs.

2 comments:

irilyth said...

Where do employers get the money that they pay to the people they hire? Presumably from income from their businesses, which is typically taxed. Presumably not by withdrawing from their colossal bank accounts or something, right?

(That doesn't mean that you're wrong in general; but I think the model of job creators as people who are sitting on a pile of wealth, and deciding whether to keep sitting on it or to hire people with it, is flawed.)

Michael said...

Income is NOT taxed when it's paid back out as salaries and benefits. That's the point. They only get taxed if they DON'T pay it back out as salaries and benefits and other business expenses.