I will ask, further, if you the reader have created a company with employees. For most people, the answer is no. Yet, this is the path to wealth. It is a path fraught with hard work, much worry, and frequent failure. Leftists only want to look at the end result, success, and not what it took to get there and how FRAGILE the will to such success is. All you have to do to make it stop is add just a bit more weight to the struggle, and it will stop. People will stop innovating and creating.
Most jobs in this country are created by small businesses, which are created by innovators, by people who see a need and work to fill that need (borrowed from the movie Robots). They seek, in other words, to get paid for being public servants, for making something available that was not available before. This is a reliable motivation, but again it is one that is easily destroyed.
I see leftists wail about the “corporations” as if they were all equal. They are not. The large corporations are the ones they usually intend, and it is thus highly ironic that the policies of the Democrats tend disproportionately to favor such corporations. It is hard to kill trees, but easy to kill small upshoots on the ground. Obamacare, as one example, is going to be a forest fire that kills much that is not already mature. It is going to vastly increase unemployment, as it will lead to many small business bankruptcies. The claim that requiring companies to increase coverage is somehow going to save them money is one best told as a joke. No serious person could consider it for a moment. In this world you never get more for less, and anyone who tells you you can is selling something: here what is being sold is continued Democrat hegemony over our national dialogue on domestic policy; what is not being sold is useful, helpful policy that will increase national happiness, and decrease the misery of any but a few.
We need the people who know how to build businesses. We need them happy and motivated to continue as paid public servants. What happens when we punish them through unnecessary regulation and excessive taxation (both subjective terms, but in my view we are far past excessive in both realms) is they STOP. They stop creating and innovating. America has the most healthcare specialists, and the best specialists, in the world. Why? Because we PAY them. When we stop paying them, which is the end goal of Obamacare, we will stop having them. Simple enough.
The rich can go on strike. And since they are the ones who create the jobs, this will lead to far less economic opportunities for EVERYONE, but most of all for the poorest, least qualified among us, which is to say the already poor.
That is more or less what has happened under Obama. He hates the profit motive, and hates the private sector. He is only comfortable with government parasites, and those who live off government largesse, like large highway contracting companies. People are not stupid: we all KNOW taxes will go up. They are already slotted to increase a LOT in 2013 to start “paying” for Obamacare (there will of course be a large shortfall, not least because Obama getting reelected, combined with the taxes, will lead in short order at least to another recession), and it is clear he wants them much, much higher, as they are in Europe.
I need to go. I will post further on this topic. One thing that I want to document and need to make the time to do is that it seems clear to me that at tax rates above about 25% or so net receipts from top income earners go down. What I think happens is that the proportion paid by the wealthiest 1% shifts down, meaning that a larger burden falls on the middle class. Tax cuts for the “rich” mean tax cuts for the middle class, and vice versa. I will document this–assuming my thesis is correct–when time permits.