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.
Industry entirely left to itself, would soon fall to ruin, and a nation letting everything alone would commit suicide.
Monetary policy ultimately must be conducted in a pragmatic manner that relies not on any particular indicator or model but, instead, reflects an ongoing assessment of a wide range of information in the context of our ever-evolving understanding of the economy.
In a very weak economy, when you say 'cut government spending,' what you mean is you're laying off school teachers and you're de-funding various programs that put money into the economy. This means you have more unemployed people that then draw unemployment benefits and don't pay taxes.
While we have created prosperity for many, too many are being left behind.
Economic systems are not value-free columns of numbers based on rules of reason, but ways of expressing what varying societies believe is important.
For most Americans, economic growth is a spectator sport.
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