Of Course Millionaires Create Jobs

Remember back when Harry Reid claimed that a very small number of millionaires create jobs?

Actually what he said was:

Millionaire job creators are like unicorns. They’re impossible to find, and they don’t exist…Only a tiny fraction of people making more than a million dollars, probably less than 1 percent, are small business owners. And only a tiny fraction of that tiny fraction are traditional job creators…Most of these businesses are hedge fund managers or wealthy lawyers. They don’t do much hiring and they don’t need tax breaks.

Liberal/progressives jumped all over this and quoted Harry Reid everywhere.  It happened here, of course, and on Facebook.  Therein lies one huge difference between a liberal/progressive and a conservative.  Progressives take any remark like this from someone on “their side” and run with it as if it’s truth without even considering doing any research.  Conservatives, on the other hand, will research things that come from the mouths of persons on either side – to debunk lies from liberal Democrats and to gather proof of what was said by a conservative Republican.  The comment that Glenn Beck made on each of his shows, telling his viewers not to believe him, but to do their own research, was not necessary.  That’s a given for most of us.

Anyone with any common sense would have realized how untrue was Harry Reid’s comment about millionaires.

Here's what Glenn Beck said after Reid's stupid comment (which, by the way, stemmed from stupid comments from NPR, a source many lib/progs think spews gospel):

 

 

 

Forbes.com did the smart thing.  They checked the IRS records (which, of course either NPR or Harry Reid could have done, but that would not have helped their agenda).

 

Sen. Harry Reid's Unicorns: Fact Checking A Whopper

 

 

Here's part of their article:

Tax policy should be serious business carried out by serious politicians using real facts and figures. This is why we have the Library of Congress and the Congressional Budget Office, among other expert institutions.

 

How can we take Congress seriously when the Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid, makes patently inaccurate, outrageous and bizarre claims on an important tax-policy issue without any heads being turned? I guess this is what we have come to expect of Congress. No wonder citizens with favorable opinions of Congress are as rare as unicorns, to borrow a phrase.

And later in the article:

 

Unlike Harry Reid’s office, I went to the IRS’s Table 1.4 “Sources of income, adjustments, and tax size of adjusted gross income, 2009” to check things out. (I summarize my sources in a separate blog posting). Here is what I found:

 

There are 236,883 tax filers with incomes of a million dollars or more. By Harry Reid’s count, only one percent, or 2,361 of them, are business owners, and a tiny fraction of them create jobs. I do not know what Harry means when he says “a tiny fraction of a tiny fraction.” If we let 5 percent represent Harry’s “tiny fraction,” we are left with 118 businesses owners who earn a million or more and create jobs. Yes, they are only slightly less rare than unicorns, if Harry is to be believed.

 

This leaves 236,765 million-dollar-plus tax payers, most of whom are “hedge fund managers and wealthy lawyers” who “don’t create jobs and don’t need tax breaks.”

 

My Google search for Harry Reid’s quarter million hedge fund managers and wealthy lawyers came up empty handed. I could identify at most sixteen thousand “wealthy lawyers and hedge fund managers,” not Harry Reid’s quarter million.

 

 

And part of the Forbes.com summary:

 

Millionaire tax filers earn almost a quarter trillion dollars from their businesses. They must hire hundreds of thousands of employees to do so.

 

There are a trivial number of millionaire hedge-fund managers and wealthy lawyers (who, according to Harry, do not hire anyone and don’t need tax breaks). The millionaire tax surcharge is not aimed at them, but at the tens of thousands of millionaire business owners.

 

A 1.9 percent surcharge on millionaires would raise at most eleven billion dollars. By today’s standards, this is chump change, within the federal budget’s rounding error.

 

The millionaire’s tax is not about balancing the budget. It is about gaining political advantage through the use of envy and greed (two of the seven deadly sins).

 

Click above for the entire article.

 

Or here at The Blaze:

Fact Check: Harry Reid‘s Claim That ’Millionaire job Creators…Don’t Exist’ Thoroughly Debunked