“NPR requested help from numerous Republican congressional offices, including House and Senate leadership. They were unable to produce a single millionaire job creator for us to interview. So we went to the business groups that have been lobbying against the surtax. Again, three days after putting in a request, none of them was able to find someone for us to talk to.”— GOP Objects To ‘Millionaires Surtax’; Millionaires We Found? Not So Much (via Tumble DC 25)
I’m thrilled NPR did this piece, but I wish they’d been more systematic—maybe they have been elsewhere—and interviewed at least one tax expert and somehow more directly fact-checked this:
The [GOP] argument is that many small-business owners report company profits on their individual taxes because of the way their businesses are structured.
Summarizing a misstatement lends it an air of validity, of objectivity, that anecdotal rejoinders don’t entirely dispel. Even the piece’s most on-point interviewee:
“If my taxes go up, I have slightly less disposable income, yes,” said [Jason] Burger, co-owner of CSS International Holdings, a global infrastructure contractor. “But that has nothing to do with what my business does….”
doesn’t explain the mechanism (how company profit ends up in personal ledgers, and at what point tax is assessed) behind Thune’s assertion; and by adding “It’s only fair that I put back into the system that is the entire reason for my success” (which: yes), Burger removes his impartiality. Really too bad, because the story here should be less that millionaires don’t want what their professed advocates say they want than GOP conflates personal income and corporate profit, which leads to the implicit (or not) question why would they do this?
*
I ran a small business for seven years, and took its profits as personal income, just as Thune says; but the taxes I paid were mine, on my income from the business, not the business’s taxes. Had I wanted to lower my personal taxes, the easiest way would have been to lower the profit available to to me take by investing in the business—new computers, office furniture; any one-time expenditures. Not new employees. Companies hire solely from need or anticipated demand. If a company hires based on having available cash—that is, takes on an ongoing cost because of a one-time assessment of its resources rather than of its future cash flow—either the new hires or the business won’t be around very long.
The money in question simply wouldn’t be considered for jobs except in the headiest of bubbles by the most profligate of companies. For small business owners especially, it would be take-home, personal income. And that’s why the GOP doesn’t want it taxed.
