Warren Buffet: stop coddling the richest Americans

[Tellos Athenaios]

Start ups are formed with the desire to get ahead and become wealthy..... not to be your own boss. That is a secondary factor at best for most entrepeneurs and the desire to make oodles of cash and expand is the goal of the majority of people.

The failure rate of start ups, the paperwork etc. etc. all dispel this notion. People who merely want to “get ahead in life” make a career in the employ of someone else without the financial liability should things go wrong. I agree that being your own boss is not necessarily the driving force behind start ups or entrepreneurs in general, but it is a recurring theme in what these people value much more than what they might hypothetically end up earning if this startup turns out to be among the tiny minority which does not fail within the first year.

... But more pertinently: in this tax debate the issue is not whether or not 5% hike in income tax would reduce the number of jobs. That's simply not an issue, at all: large companies don't hire nearly as much staff as what they lay off, it is the small and medium businesses where the jobs are created. And for those businesses it is the money spent by customers that counts, rather than an modest income tax hike which assuming a uniform distribution* of customer incomes affects spending of less than 10% of their customers anyway.

* And this distribution of affected spending will not be uniform, actually: most small and medium business sells relatively mundane articles which are in demand. It's the small & medium business which specialise in luxuries such as jewelry that would be affected more than the petrol station for instance.