"I have started or helped start, dozens of businesses and initially hired lots of people. But if no one could have afforded to buy what we had to sell, my businesses would all have failed and all those jobs would have evaporated."
This is what some people fail to understand and it boggles my mind.
To which the standard debate-derailing answer is 'raise taxes, and nobody will be able to buy private goods, therefore more taxes are bad.' A great many tax objectors have convinced themselves that they are already groaning under a massive tax burden.
I agree with them in one respect: there are too many taxes, fees, levies etc. People overestimate the amount of tax tax they pay in many cases, but they see so many government charges (whether federal, state or local) that they feel they're being nickel-and-dimed to death.
A 'job' is something that you 'do', in this context, for a wage. So to "create a job" is to cause a need for something to be done, e.g. breaking a window "creates a job".
So we don't want to "create jobs"!
There are certainly lots of people right now who are looking for gainful employment. Let's reframe the problem in terms of figuring out how to get them doing stuff that actually needs doing. I think that means creating things of lasting value, not just throwing money around to stimulate ourselves.
"I have started or helped start, dozens of businesses and initially hired lots of people. But if no one could have afforded to buy what we had to sell, my businesses would all have failed and all those jobs would have evaporated."
This is what some people fail to understand and it boggles my mind.