You may have noticed the current trend from the Republicans in the constant defense of their rich puppetmasters is in calling them ‘job creators’ instead of ‘wealth-hoarders’. It’s a very convenient word conflation for them as it helps to package all the truthiness of trickle-down economics in one bite sized nugget, ready to be fried and splattered all over prime time.
Tack on top of that the fact that unemployment is quite high, and one would think that it’s the job creators who are really having a tough go of it – after all, they’re just not able to keep coming up with enough jobs to employ everyone! This is of course what the Republicans want you to believe: that if only they were taxed less, these job creating paladins would ride their alabaster steeds of economic growth roughshod over the fiery demons of unemployment.
Now, I am not going to claim that the rich do not create jobs, because they do. In fact, my current position is exactly such a job at a small startup company. But the simple fact of the matter is that if we increased our revenues by, say, a million dollars, we wouldn’t immediately turn around and spend that on more employees. A well run company is not in the business of making jobs, but making money. And our society as a whole doesn’t care so much about how many jobs you create as how much money you have.
This fact is spelled out quite plainly in the latest issue of Forbes magazine, where they do an annual feature detailing the richest Americans. There it is right in the headline:
Bill Gates tops Forbes list of richest Americans
If you scan through the article, you’ll get a feel for exactly how much job creation is valued in comparison to the acquisition of wealth.
When was the last time you heard one businessman ask another “So, how many jobs did you create last year?”. When is the Forbes issue going to come out with the article of the “100 top job creators”? I’m going to go ahead and guess never to both answers. Why? Because rich people don’t outdo each other by creating more jobs. In fact, sometimes profits are maximized by employing fewer people. And I’m guessing there aren’t a whole lot of people kept awake at night because they haven’t created enough jobs lately.
