There is an interesting hidden assumption behind the current debates over taxes and healthcare. That assumption is that the first and foremost goal of corporate executives is to hire as many workers as possible, with a very secondary goal of paying them as much as possible. If you give executives more money they supposedly will immediately and willingly hire more workers and/or pay their existing workers more; hence, the cliche "job-killing tax."
That is kind of back-asswards: employing workers is in fact viewed as a necessary evil. The goal of a corporate executive is in fact to make as much MONEY as possible, NOT to employ as many workers as possible. He or she wants to maximize profit, NOT payroll. Even in labor-intensive industries, companies will try to hire as few workers as they need to get the work done, for the simple reason that even the most underpaid employees are expensive.
In government, where there is no profit motive per se, there is much less pressure to minimize the workforce. In fact there is some political pressure to maximize it. Although high taxes and big government are harmful in many ways, if you wanna create jobs right away, the most direct way to do that is (ironically) to raise taxes and use the revenues to finance more government. In the short run, cutting taxes actually destroys jobs.
In NH, as in many other states, we have businesspeople running for high office on the premise that they have a commitment to--- and a magical capacity for--- creating jobs. Maybe these businesspeople made a lot of money during their business careers, but they always claim that it is never about the fortune, or even the fame. It's always about creating jobs. One of them, a Senatorial hopeful and retired plastic-bag magnate named Bill Binnie, recently embarrassed himself by forgetting that the First Amendment was the section of the Constitution which guarantees freedom of religion was. His excuse was, and he said this during a debate: "Let's be clear about this: I'm not a lawyer, I know how to create thousands and thousands of jobs." In his case, he asked We the People to assume that his magical ability to create jobs was all that should mattered to us as we decided who to choose as our Senator: it trumped even the fact that he evidently knows nothing about the U.S. Constitution.