Tax the Rich to Punish the Poor

Silicon Valley entrepreneur T.J. Rodgers published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal yesterday, called Targeting the Wealthy Kills Jobs.  Mr. Rodgers makes the excellent point that punishing the "wealthy" (which really means those who work, create, innovate, invent, build, and invest successfully, to the benefit of us all) ends up really punishing the poor--those who need a job and can't find one.  He provides his own experience showing that private investment in small business creates more jobs per dollar invested than so-called "stimulus" programs, by a large margin.  But taxing those who would make those investments means those jobs are never created.  As he says:

This data squares with the broad numbers showing that private investment is more efficient than government spending in creating jobs. In other words: Every dollar that is taxed away from private investment and spent by government produces fewer jobs than the jobs destroyed by the loss of private investment.

Or as I might say it, government spending destroys wealth.

Here is his take-away point:

Yet the politics of envy, promoted most notably by President Obama himself, continuously stokes the idea that the wealthy are not paying their "fair share." This injured sense of unjust rewards was summed up on a radio show I heard the other day, when a caller said of the rich: "How much more do they need?"

How much more do I need? How many more jobs do you want?