If low taxes were the way that people like me created wealth, then we'd be starting our companies in the Congo or Somalia or Afghanistan, but we're not. We come to places where there are lots and lots of customers.
Interpretation
Wealth creation is driven more by market opportunities than by tax rates.
In this quote, Nick Hanauer emphasizes that entrepreneurs are motivated by the potential for customer demand rather than the allure of low taxes. He argues that the presence of a large market is what drives business success and wealth creation, illustrating that it's the economic environment, not just fiscal policies, that attracts investment and innovation.
In practice
During a seminar on entrepreneurship, I could reference this quote to illustrate that market demand is crucial for business success.
The most powerful forces in economics are not numbers or facts. They are prejudices and preferences. No amount of evidence will ever change the degree to which many of the rich and powerful prefer themselves to be richer and more powerful and others poorer and weaker.
Raising the minimum wage allows business people to stop thinking about workers simply as costs to be cut and allows you to start thinking about workers as customers to be cultivated.
When you have a tax system in which most of the exemptions and the lowest rates benefit the richest, all in the name of job creation, all that happens is that the rich get richer.
The most insidious thing about trickle-down economics is not the claim that if the rich get richer, everyone is better off. It is the claim made by those who oppose any increase in the minimum wage that if the poor get richer, that will be bad for the economy. This is nonsense.
You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state. Or an uprising. There are no counterexamples. None. It's not if, it's when.
The thing I've learned most about poverty is how expensive it is to be poor. It's super easy to pay rent every month if you earn enough to pay rent and have a decent job. It's super hard to pay rent if you need a coupon from the state and then need to go find an apartment that will accept that coupon and only that coupon.
The introduction of a substantial Government transfer tax on all transactions might prove the most serviceable reform available,with a view to mitigating the predominance of speculation in the United States.
Not only our future economic soundness but the very soundness of our democratic institutions depends on the determination of our government to give employment to idle men.
My premise is not to tax to destroy the wealth of the wealthy; it's to increase the wealth of the bottom and the middle class.
You don't drive an economy by consuming - the consumer is not the engine, the consumer is the caboose.
Before the 1970s, banks were banks. They did what banks were supposed to do in a state capitalist economy: they took unused funds from your bank account, for example, and transferred them to some potentially useful purpose like helping a family buy a home or send a kid to college.
Capitalism is not an 'ism.' It is closer to being the opposite of an 'ism,' because it is simply the freedom of ordinary people to make whatever economic transactions they can mutually agree to.
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