Moved from another thread.
Lets try this again. . .
I'm Joe business owner. I have 4 employees and one part-time janitorial staff. I pay for an excellent benefit package including healthcare for my employees. I have a big home, 3 kids and a timeshare in Branson. I pull $250,000 in "salary" distribution from my company every year. I am far below the number of employees necessary to be required to cover medical care yet I find myself facing an unknown increase in medical insurance costs. Next year I will have to pay about $12,000 more in taxes. No problem, I will simply pull a higher distribution from the company. If my margin is tight (as in most businesses these days) I will eliminate un-necessary staff, or simply raise my prices. After all, my competition faces the same decisions.
Now, I am not an island. My venders, steve, Doug, and Hector are facing the same decisions. Steve and Doug raise their prices to me to cover the new tax burden. Hector eliminates a weak product line that I happen to carry and reduces some of his staff.
So now, on top of the additional tax burden, and the unknown state of benefit costs, I have increased wholesale costs and the loss of a product line, and the consumers of my products have to pay more and therefore purchase my products less often. They are sad, as am I.
The CHANGE that has occured is that revenue has been extracted from the free market to pay for government debt. Libs would say, "Yeah we took it from those evil rich folks," but I own my business and manage the mechanisim. I may sacrifice some of my income to increased taxes, but not before I exhaust every avenue to preserve it. Therefore workforce contracts, and most expenses are transfered to the consumer (I hopefully don't have to tell you that the vast majority of consumers in this country are the middle class).
Now, play this same scenario through with a bunch of rich guys in a large corporation or publicly traded company and the outcome is virtually identical. Taxes and increases in cost are transferred to the consumer, or extracted from the stock holder (middle class 401Ks make up the majority of those). If the market won't bare the increases, labor is reduced and efficiencies in production are implemented.
I keep my fish, and you get to pay for it. Don't complain, after all, you voted for it.
This concludes Sock Puppet Theater.The president knows this. Raising taxes even on the wealthy "Sucks up. . .uh. . .takes more demand out of the economy and puts businesses in a further hole."
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aufAtuTwKlE[/youtube]