Or, at least, some of them apparently do not.
I was watching The Daily Show yesterday and they did a segment on "Moneyed-Americans" backlash (or, at least, the conservative media who protects them) over the Occupy Wall Street Movement. In the segment, a gentleman named Peter Schiff (identified as CEO of Euro Pacific Capital, Inc.) was shown lecturing a protestor saying:
If you raise my taxes, maybe I'll just decide to sell my business and fire 150 people.
Or Bill O'Reilly who said:
If Barack Obama begins taxing me at more than 50% - which is very possible - I don't know how much longer I'm going to do this.
By the way, that is, of course, not at all possible. For one, the President does not set tax policy; that is done by Congress. Secondly, President Obama has not proposed anything close to 50%; he has merely suggested we go back to the tax rates of President Bill Clinton (with the top tax rate being 39.6%).
Regardless, for the sake of this post, we will take these gentlemen at their word.
So what happens if Bill O'Reilly quits? FoxNews will not go dark at 8pm - no matter how much many of us would like it to; some other right-wing jack-hole will fill that time slot; staff will be hired and the effect on net jobs would be negligible. Mr. O'Reilly would fade into TV history like those before him and those that will follow. History stops for no one. Not even Tim Tebow.
As for Mr. Schiff, consider first his statement that if he might "sell his business and fire 150 people". You don't have to have an MBA to realize that if he sells his business, it will no longer be his decision as to who is fired and who is retained. (By the way, if Mitt Romney were to buy it, everybody is fired!) If he does not sell, but rather just decides to "take his ball and go home" (i.e. just close the business because taxes increased by ~4%) - as far-fetched as that is - the free market would fill that void; his market share would be taken by some other business (with people employed to take on that business).
So next time your conservative uncle or father or father-in-law warns you about progressive tax policy vis-a-vis job creation. You just tell him that he should have a little faith in the free market!
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