Obama’s Tax Hike on Job Creators

Obama’s Tax Hike on Job Creators
Amy Payne
July 10, 2012 at 8:53 am

“The last thing you want to do is to raise taxes in the middle of a recession, because that would just suck up—take more demand out of the economy and put businesses in a further hole.”

That was President Obama in 2009, trying to reassure Americans that he was going to wait until after the recession to raise taxes. Yesterday, he began pushing again for higher taxes on the “wealthy“—which would actually hit 1.2 million of the country’s most successful job creators.

As if the Obamacare tax hike and the rest of Taxmageddon weren’t enough.

The tax increase du jour is a recycled one: The President’s long-held plan to raise taxes on incomes over $200,000 ($250,000 for families). Interestingly, President Obama is to the left of his liberal allies in Congress such as Senator Charles Schumer (D–NY) and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D–CA) on the definition of the “rich.” Schumer and Pelosi set the mark at as those making more than $1 million annually. That is five times higher than President Obama’s $200,000 mark. Apparently even they recognize the President’s plan would be too punitive on job creators (although they are still willing to stick it to the most successful job creators for the sake of class warfare).

This misguided plan would hurt Americans at all income levels, because it would slow job creation.

As Heritage’s Curtis Dubay explains in new research, the President’s tax increase would fall heavily on important job-creating businesses that pay their taxes through the individual income tax, known as flow-through businesses.

There has been considerable debate about whether flow-through businesses that pay the higher rates are job creators. A report from Obama’s own Treasury Department, however, provides data that settle the point conclusively. For the first time, this report breaks out the number of flow-through businesses that have employees.

According to the Treasury study, 4.3 million of these small businesses employed workers in 2007 (the most recent year for which data are available). The Treasury report shows that 1.2 million, or 28 percent, of them earned more than $200,000—the income threshold over which President Obama’s tax increase would apply. More importantly for job creation, those 28 percent of businesses earned almost all—91 percent—of the income earned by flow-through employer-businesses.

https://tinyurl.com/c4y6xgq