Our country’s true job creators

Nick Hanauer

Bloomberg.com

Rich people don’t create jobs, said Nick Hanauer, and I should know. As a venture capitalist and entrepreneur, I’ve started and invested in dozens of manufacturing, retail, medical, and Internet companies that have made me very rich. But I don’t consider myself “a job creator.” No matter how many people I hire, my businesses will collapse—and the jobs will disappear—if consumers can’t afford to buy what I’m selling.

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Our country’s prosperity has always required a strong, vibrant middle class, whose consumer hunger is the engine that creates wealth for everyone. Yet with the middle class now in dire straits, Republicans insist that if we raise taxes on the rich to help the middle class, “job creation will stop.” This is transparently false. In recent years, superrich Americans and corporations have grown even wealthier. But all that wealth concentrated in few hands has created very few jobs.

If we want our economy to recover, we need to “give a break to the true job creators” by raising taxes on the superrich and putting more money in the wallets of the middle class. “Capitalists without customers are out of business.”