The other side is deep in thought. All the time, they are in their tank thinking, thinking, thinking.
”What concept, term or catchphrase can we invent to get the poor to give us more money? How can we protect our piles and piles of money—and make more?
What can we call filthy rich people that won’t make them sound filthy or rich? Let’s call them ‘job creators’! Yes! After all, this makes them sound like they run businesses instead of sitting around the pool. We can pretend that if we just give them more money they’ll hire the unemployed.
But, rich people aren’t job creators. The people that create jobs are workers. Workers create jobs. And it’s time we helped our job creators create some jobs.
It grates on my nerves every time I hear some ’Publican on the tube talk about how raising taxes will hurt the “job creators”. Let’s think hard ourselves about this. Who creates jobs?
Here’s how it really works: A guy with an idea decides he needs work done in order to turn his idea into a reality. He goes begging to people with money and they loan it to him at exorbitant rates. Then he gets a facility and buys supplies and materials and advertises a job opening. If he’s lucky, a job creator (we call them “workers”) shows up and agrees to do the job. When that laborer agrees to do the work, that’s what creates the job. Until then, the guy with the idea doesn’t have a job. He only has a job opening. He has a job opportunity. He has a position. But he doesn’t have a job.
Once, I’d like to turn on the tube (which I actually get on the Intertubes these days) and hear someone from our side say:
We need to help the job creators. The government hasn’t done anything for job creators for thirty years. The workers are the job creators. When do they get their due?
It doesn’t take money to think. We don’t need our own think tanks. All we need is to look at what they say and tell the truth about it. John Hanley said, “The only way to make a difference is to look out there and tell the truth about what you see.”
The truth is that people with money don’t create jobs. The jobs come only when someone agrees to do the work. Talking as if the rich create jobs leaves out half of the equation. And, the factor on the other side of that equation is the 90% of people in this country that get their income from a paycheck.
And furthermore, as Jeremyzerbe points out in The Myth of Job Creation, no one is a job creator without demand:
Rich people … are simply the tools, not the catalyst. The catalyst that creates jobs is a basic principle of economics…. It's called supply and demand.
But the policy of the federal government is to ship wealth-producing jobs overseas and keep wages down. That’s why wages have dropped 8% since the 1970s while a quarter of our manufacturing jobs have been outsourced to other countries. That’s why you make less even through worker productivity has climbed 80% since then. That’s why unemployment is 0.9% higher than it was in the thirty years before 1978 (when manufacturing peaked). Almost one and a half million job creators are out of work simply because of bad economic policy, and Congress is at fault for that because Congress sets the terms of trade and determines policy on industrial direction, investment, and education.
The bottom line is that taxes are not too high. Incomes are too low. If you’re having problems paying your taxes, you need a raise. To help out the job creators we need much better economic and tax policy. We need to redress the trade imbalance and we need to make people in the top 1% pay their fair share. They have over 40% of the wealth. When are they going to be paying 40% of the costs?