A Poor Man Never Gave Me a Job
This is a truism. It’s important that people begin to understand the implications of this statement. The rich, wealthy individuals, or successful companies, drive the economy. Harming them in the name of “fairness” is a recipe for a declining economy, less opportunity, and ultimately poverty for a large number of people.
Investment
Say I’m a middle class guy (which I am) and I have an idea for a product or service. “Go to the bank! Get a loan!” people will advise. There are two aspects of this that most people don’t seem to think about.
The first is that the money that the bank has to loan is the savings of people… people with money! The wealthy or well-off. Sure, some people who are not wealthy have savings, but that doesn’t amount to a lot usually. Most of us have our checking accounts where money is going in, and coming back out before the end of the month in roughly equal amounts. The big savings that allows people of lesser means to take loans from banks comes from people who have large savings accounts–the rich.
Second, when you walk into a bank to ask for a loan to start or expand a business, you need collateral. You are putting your personal assets on the line for the loan. If you don’t have enough collateral, or the guy reading your business plan doesn’t understand the vision and potential behind your product or service, you’re not getting a loan.
So if you get the loan, what you’re getting is a loan of money from people better off than you, ultimately. The dreaded rich, for example. If the money that the rich person would have saved is, instead, going to taxes for the government to spend, that’s bad news for you. The bank has no money to loan.
If you don’t get your loan, where do you turn?
You can only turn to people who have what we call “risk capital” available… The rich. Look at the story of Apple Computer, for example. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak had this great little product and a great vision. They created it in Jobs’ parents’ (middle class family) garage. Unless they met Mike Markula, who had risk capital available to fund the project, they would have been dead in the water.
It is the people with extra money lying around and who have a desire to expand that wealth who invest in risky ventures. They risk the money knowing that they could easily lose it all, but they can afford it. They can afford it because at some point in their lives they made a lot of money working for it, and with the success of other investments. These people know that they are going to lose money most of the time (using their knowledge or their vision as the only guide to reducing that risk), but they also know that if an investment hits, it could hit big! That washes out other losses.
You simply cannot go to people with no risk capital available and ask them to invest in your new venture. They either don’t have the money (literally, as they are living paycheck to paycheck) or their savings is too small and precious to them to risk it. Not to mention the SEC regulations that “protect” people from making risky investments (I have to read the new law just passed to see what that’s done to enable people who are not “qualified investors”–people with over a million dollars in liquid assets–to take risks that might provide big rewards).
It is the rich who fund new opportunities, taking the risks financially as the entrepreneur takes the risk with their ideas and vision.
In terms of a rich person providing jobs, here we’re also talking about people who are already successful hiring new employees as their businesses expand. A struggling business isn’t hiring. Someone losing money isn’t hiring. Only the successful–the rich, or the on-their-way-to-rich, are hiring.
What about other jobs? Does a poor person hire someone to paint their house, or do their yard work, or even tackle a plumbing problem? No. They do it themselves if they can afford to do it at all. The people who make their livings taking care of other people’s property do so only because of people who have accumulated enough wealth so that they don’t have to do those things themselves. A poor person isn’t even going to give a kid a job mowing his lawn.
The Great Market Makers
When any product idea is new, there aren’t economies of scale that bring prices down so that the average person, or even the poor, can afford them. The first market for emerging technologies is the rich. This was true for the flush toilet, and it’s true for cell phones and flat screen TVs. One of my favorite examples of this is the original DVD-type player, the laser disk, where movies were put on a (usually gold in color) disk the size of a vinyl record. Nobody could afford that unless they were rich. The technology actually failed, as the manufacturers saw there could be a market, but they needed a less expensive, less cumbersome, technology. You don’t find old, unused laser disk players in the attics of poor and middle class people. It was the rich who spent the money on the new technology (ultimately wasted money), which ultimately enabled manufacturers to improve the technology and bring the price down with economies of scale.
Same story with flat screen TVs and cell phones. Who, but the well-off were carrying around huge bricks they could make phone calls on, or having big phones installed in their cars, and paying outrageous fees per minute for the convenience of making a phone call wherever they happened to be? The signal had to be bad, because there weren’t many towers. But it was those well off people making those purchases that identified the market and enabled manufacturers and service providers to both see the potential and afford the expansion, through economies of scale, that got us to the point where it seems everyone, even the poor, can have a cell phone. It may not be an iPhone, but a low-cost, prepaid phone purchased at Walmart can serve the purpose. That would not have been possible if the rich weren’t the early adopters and advocates of the technology.
Indoor plumbing, HVAC, all manner of recreational and leisure products… The story is the same. The rich consume the products, even the “destined-to-fail” products, and provide the manufacturers with the means and knowledge to expand production with economies of scale to bring the prices down so that everyone can eventually afford the products. Look at the stats of HVAC, bathrooms, TVs, microwaves, computers, phones, etc. in “poor” peoples’ homes if you don’t believe me. Most of the poor at the beginning of the 21st century live with many more conveniences than the rich at the beginning of the 20th.
Carrying the Burden
The Democrat meme about the rich “not paying their fair share” is simply a falsehood. Forget that they never define “fair,” which is done on purpose so that they can simply demagogue the issue. Anyone with any sense of fairness looks at the top 1% of earners paying 38% of the taxes (I heard yesterday that the preliminary new data on that is that the top 1% most recently has paid 44% of the taxes), and the top 5% paying almost 60% of the taxes (I didn’t hear the preliminary new data on this, but obviously it’s gone up too) and they can’t say those people aren’t paying their fair share. This is especially true when you look at the percentage of income made by those groups, which generally works out to about half of the percentage they pay in taxes (the top 1% of earners make 19% of the income, for example).
Any way you slice the numbers, the rich pay a disproportionately large share of the taxes. They try to fool us with idiocy like saying that Mitt Romney had an effective tax rate of 15% (or was it 14%… I forget), never mentioning that it is all dividend income which is taxed twice, once at the corporate level (where profits–the only thing that can be paid out as dividends–are taxed at a world-leading rate of 35%) and again when it hits Mitt’s pocket at 15%, giving the treasury an overall tax rate on the money Mitt Romney puts in his wallet of 50%. And this is to say nothing of the benefit to the economy via the growth of the company (the jobs it provides, the ancillary jobs created for people in other businesses that do business with that company, etc.) of Mitt’s investment in the first place.
The other burden the rich carry is charitable giving (unless you’re a Democrat, particularly a wealthy Democrat politician, which makes you far less likely to charitable with your money, statistically speaking). Do poor people give charities endowments? Many people with lesser means are extremely generous, even foolishly generous. But, even when they’re generous beyond what they logically should be, do you think it is the money of the poor and lower middle class that provides funding for charities and community projects? I don’t know about your community, but in my community it is the successful business people and successful businesses that provide damned near all of the funding for every community project and charity. And these are the people who are already paying the highest tax rates (property taxes, state, and federal taxes).
Summary
The savings, spending, and investment of the wealthy people in this country makes the economy go and grow. It’s really that simple.
Most people don’t get wealthy by accident. We don’t live in a society where some relative, somewhere back in time was deemed a duke or earl by a king or queen and was able to amass great wealth on the backs of the peasants. The leftists want us to believe that’s the case, but it simply isn’t.
In the USA, even if you have inherited money, someone, at some point in your family’s history, figured out a way to earn it. Even if you inherited it, you have to save it, spend it, or invest it, which is helpful to the overall economy. Most people who are wealthy are newly wealthy. The top 1%, or even the top 5% or top 20% are not a fixed group. As Thomas Sowell points out, if you look at individuals over time, there is a lot of movement to and from the higher income groups. It is only when you look at the static percentages that you can be fooled into believing that the same people (or families) are always at the top and always at the bottom. The leftists want us to think that way, but the reality is very different. Wealth is still something that can be attained from anywhere along the spectrum. Losing family wealth is also a real possibility, and, in fact, unless money is shepherded in ways where that money continues to contribute to the overall economy through savings and investment (and spending) losing it is a probability, not a possibility.
Becoming rich is still something that we should, if we are so inclined, aspire to. It is not an evil. It should not be demonized. The rich make a tremendous contribution to the nation, not merely in the taxes they pay, but by using their resources to build more wealth and prosperity. It doesn’t trickle down, it flows down. A rising tide does lift all boats. Wealthy people spending their money creates jobs and prosperity for someone else. Wealthy people saving their money provides the money banks can loan to others to fulfill their dreams. Investment in risky ventures by the wealthy (the only group who can afford the risk) provides us with new products and services, and new jobs… New opportunities to become wealthy ourselves so that we can make the same kinds of contributions other rich people make.
The Contribution Businesses Make
One of the things that changed my life, and my view of capitalism, was something my father did when I worked for his company. At that time I was still under the sway of my college training and relentless demonization of “corporations” in the media and by Democrats in particular. It seemed the bad guys were always businessmen.
A short history (which I only appreciated fully after I took my blinders off): My father started a company (publicly traded) when I was a little kid. The company was successful, due mostly to his hard work and vision. It wasn’t an Apple Computer, by any stretch of the imagination, but it was a profitable small business that provided needed products for industry, made money for investors, and employed about fifty people. (If you read my book, The Tamarack Conspiracy, the company and characters I describe are taken from the real thing).
On a bit of a lark, partially in reaction to some politician talking down business, my dad gave the comptroller of the company an assignment. He wanted to know how much the little company he’d started had contributed to society, forgetting the value of the products to the consumers, but just looking at the taxes collected by the federal, state, and local governments. To do this, you need to look at corporate income tax (paid to the feds and state), but also the taxes paid by the employees (who couldn’t pay those taxes without those jobs), also including the FICA, and the property taxes paid locally. The comptroller couldn’t figure out a way to estimate sales taxes paid by employees for purchases that would be accurate (purchases made possible by the employees having a job that gave them pay that allowed them to make purchases), or how to estimate gasoline taxes paid (again, as a result of people having a job that gave them pay that enabled them to drive), or what the property taxes paid by employees owning their homes (as a result of, etc. etc.) amounted to. Those items were extra, but also made possible by the company being successful enough to hire people, and pay them a good wage.
The existence of this relatively small, fairly successful company, over time, had contributed many millions of dollars to society (if you define society as governments). It had also supported communities with donations both to charities and community activities such as sponsoring baseball teams and community projects such as building parks.
The business was not built for greed, by the way. It was built for love. My dad loved the product he’d invented that started the company. He’d seen a problem and he figured out a way to solve it. He loved the freedom of working in his own company (though, as CEO, he really worked for his shareholders, customers, and even his employees… something most people don’t really understand who have never owned a business). He really loved his employees, and they loved him back. Nobody was happier than my father when an employee was able, because of their job in my dad’s company, to get married, or buy a house, or even purchase a cabin on a lake. I believe this is true of most entrepreneurs. Sure, they want to get paid, but they want to get paid as a result of having done something worthy, having contributed to people’s lives with their product or service, and the money is simply the acknowledgement of their success at having made that contribution.
My point, however, is the millions of dollars that rolled out of that small company that paid for government at all levels. Businesses make government possible. They not only create wealth in the private sector, but they are the only vehicle for producing the wealth consumed by government. Anything good government can do can only be done because of the businesses that are creating the wealth. This is obvious to anyone who would read this blog, because I assume my readers understand free market capitalism and wealth creation. But there are people, one of whom occupies the White House, who don’t seem to understand this simple concept. Harm businesses and you harm everything.
An aside: One day I was sitting on the dock at our family’s cabin, fishing (when I was in my early twenties my dad was finally getting paid enough so that he could afford a vacation home–something VERY common in Minnesota and the rest of the upper midwest). I was watching the clouds and it suddenly occurred to me that the way water was transported by nature–oceans and lakes, evaporation, condensation into clouds, clouds roaming over the land, rain and snowfall, rivers taking the water back to the oceans–was an incredibly efficient system. It is a beautiful design, really.
Back to business: Harming businesses (with taxes, regulations, cronyism, creating a business unfriendly environment in general) is like figuring out a way to destroy clouds and then wondering why there’s a drought.
My father’s little company (still going, by the way, even after his death–I don’t work there though) contributed many millions of dollars to society. In my post yesterday I called your attention to a PJTV episode of Trifecta in which Bill Whittle talked about the same thing regarding a huge company, the richest company in the world at this moment, Apple Computer, which was apparently accused of not paying it’s fair share of taxes. How many billions do you suppose Apple Computer could account for over time if it did my father’s little experiment and tallied all of the tax revenue generated not only through corporate income tax, but also the taxes collected because of the jobs it provided, and the property taxes it paid? From the smallest mom and pop operation, to companies like my father’s, to Apple Computer, the contribution of business is… Well, it’s the only contribution there is. That’s the bottom line.
Where else is government at any level going to get money? No businesses, no jobs, no taxes collected, no government. Why don’t leftist, statists understand this? Rather than appreciating the miraculous efficiency of evaporation and cloud formation and precipitation and rivers, they’re cursing the clouds and trying to destroy them.