The Myth of the Job Creators

The Job Creators. It’s a popular Republican canard meant to indicate that taxing the wealthy and corporations hurts job creation. Well, as you might expect, that’s not entirely true. There is data available to debunk this myth. Steven Strauss, a Leadership Fellow at Harvard, unearthed these statistics.

Read the full article here. 

That’s a rather damning argument against the idea that taxing businesses hinders job creation. A similar argument was made by Fox talk show host, Bill O’Reilly. He stated that taxing the wealthy would stifle innovation and cause people; such as himself, to just quit doing what they do. If this were actually true then I would propose a special tax levied specifically on O’Reilly.

Strauss goes on to point out that:

…it is not just how the money is raised, but how it is spent. Tax revenues that improve infrastructure, and pay for basic research and education are investments in our future, and will foster economic growth. Tax cuts that primarily favor high end consumers might stimulate the purchase of luxury goods, but may not contribute much to overall economic growth.

…ideology is a poor substitute for pragmatic approaches to complicated problems. In fact the evidence that tax rates influence economic growth in any way is equivocal at best. A myriad of other factors are involved. Simply reducing tax rates, and primarily for the wealthy, may hinder — rather than enhance, our economic recovery.

Feel free to cut and paste this article to the next person who utters the phrase ‘job creators’ as an argument for tax cuts for the wealthy.

Related articles

• Steven Strauss: Actually Tax Cuts Don’t Seem to Have Much Impact on Economic Growth… (huffingtonpost.com)
• One More Reason to Raise Taxes on the Rich: Bill O’Reilly Threatens to ‘Pack It In’ (crooksandliars.com)
• Jon Stewart Doesn’t See Downside of Bill O’Reilly Quitting Over Tax Hikes (VIDEO) (aoltv.com)