Nick Hanauer Job Quotations

We rich people have been falsely persuaded by our schooling and the affirmation of society, and have convinced ourselves, that we are the main job creators. It's simply not true.

You see, we capitalists will never actually ask you to work overtime. I don't even track your hours. I just make it clear that I trust you to get your job done in the time allotted. And then I hand you twice as much work as you can reasonably do in a 40-hour week.

We became enthralled with the view that wealth trickled down from the top and that if you poured money into rich people, sort of like an ingredient, prosperity and jobs would squirt out of them like donuts. And if you understand economies in the 19th-century way, that view is plausible, and I think a lot of people accepted it.

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.

If Jeff Bezos and I had started Amazon.com in a poverty-stricken corner of Africa, there would have been no job creation because there would be no people to buy the stuff from Amazon.com. The difference here is the American middle class, which is by every measure the most extraordinary economic achievement in the history of the world.

Business people do two things with their time fundamentally. The first is that they try to create sales, right? Revenue, key to business. But the other thing they devote their time to equally is cost containment. That is to say, how to not create jobs. Because the fewer jobs you can create for the revenue you create, the more profit you make.

Now one person doing the job of one and a half. So as an employer I can get two people to do the work of three, and think about what that does for profits.

When businesspeople take credit for creating jobs, it is like squirrels taking credit for creating evolution. In fact, it's the other way around.

My message is that the counterclaim - which is that if wages go up, employment will go down - is a scam. It's a con job. It's an intimidation tactic. There is absolutely no evidence anywhere that it's true. On the contrary, where you find high wages you usually find low unemployment.

If it was true that lower taxes for the rich and more wealth to the wealthy leat to job creation, today we would be drowning in jobs.