Rich People Don’t Create The Jobs - Business Insider
▻http://www.businessinsider.com/rich-people-dont-create-jobs-2014-6
Centi-millionaire Nick Hanauer is at it again.
One of the country’s most successful entrepreneurs and investors, Hanauer is on a mission to teach his fellow 1%-ers how the economy actually works — how jobs are actually created, how a higher minimum wage would actually help, and how the crazy “trickle-down nonsense” parroted by the ruling class is creating record inequality and actually crippling the economy.
As Hanauer points out in a new essay in POLITCO, “The Pitchforks Are Coming...For Us Plutocrats,” the problem with our economy is that the once-powerful middle class has been impoverished by decades of cost cuts and wage stagnation, while Hanauer and his friends have captured an ever-greater percentage of the country’s income. Unlike Hanauer and other 1%-ers, middle class people spend almost every penny they make, and this spending becomes revenue for companies started and owned by people like Hanauer. But right now, thanks to shortsighted greed, wages are at record lows as a percent of the economy, and the middle class is hurting. And that hurt, in turn, is holding back the revenue growth of companies owned by Hanauer.
Wages as a percent of GDP are at an all-time low.
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Saying “rich people create the jobs” is like saying that seeds create trees. Seeds do not create trees. Seeds start trees. But what actually grows and sustains trees is the combination of the DNA in the seed and the soil, sunshine, water, atmosphere, nutrients, and other factors in the environment that nurture them. If you think seeds create trees, try planting seeds in an inhospitable environment. Plant a seed in a desert or on Mars, and the seed won’t create anything. It will die.