Nick Hanauer Quotes
Like most plutocrats, I, too, am a proud and unapologetic capitalist. I have founded, cofounded or funded over 30 companies across a range of industries. I was the first non-family investor in Amazon.com. I cofounded a company called aQuantive that we sold to Microsoft for 6.4 billion dollars. My friends and I, we own a bank.
Hanauer, Nick. "The Pitchforks Are Coming... For Us Plutocrats." Politico Magazine, Jul.-Aug. 2014.
This is a very important economic-political quotation. One conservative mantra in the 20th and 21st centuries was that business growth and development will be spurred by tax cuts in the marginal tax rate that the businessperson would have to pay. “Marginal” means the additional tax for each additional dollar of income. However, the development and growth of most businesses, especially the entrepreneurial ones that tend to create the most new high wage jobs. Bill Gates, Henry Ford, Steve Jobs, Thomas Watson Jr. and other creators of great business enterprises, in general do not even consider their potential profit as the most important reward. They are almost always on a mission to change the way people function in the world. They generally want to make money but the driving factor is really the change in society that they will produce. While Gates and other great business creators do not change their business behavior on the bases of marginal tax rates (or any other kind to tax rates for the matter), the 2nd and 3rd generation of business manager who takes over existing companies is motivated in great part by marginal tax rates. Summers and many others argue that not only are the best jobs created by those who are unmotivated by tax rates, but they are the same businesses that tend to produce most of the great innovations of society. Therefore, find other ways to incentivize the entrepreneurs rathefr than marginal tax rate policy.
Nicolas Joseph Hanauer is an American entrepreneur and venture capitalist.
