I agree with conservative Phil Krinkie and others

Businesses don't create jobs because of tax cuts, and they don't leave the state because taxes are too high.

Thank you, Phil Krinkie, for being a conservative willing to say that. Krinkie, as you may remember, was a longtime conservative member of the Minnesota House, and chairman of the Tax Committee.

He made the comment to MinnPost's Eric Black in a very interesting story on Tim Pawlenty's tenure as governor. It's very much worth reading.

The job creation argument has been the stuff of political rhetoric, says Krinkie. This comes from someone who worked years with dozens of business leaders, one of whom told him he kept his business in the state because his kids were in high school and it had nothing to do with taxes.

Over and over again, this year, we had those running for office saying any tax increase on the wealthy or business would be a "job killer." It's one of the most unproven statements I've ever seen the media let people get away with.

Another longtime businessman, Myles Spicer of Minnetonka, who also wrote a great essay for MinnPost titled "What Small Business Really Wants." And, according to Spicer, it's not a tax cut, really.

Spicer established and owned several successful ad agencies in the Twin Cities and been in business for 40 years.

There is not one study I have seen that shows small businesses cut jobs when their taxes go up or add them when their taxes go down.

But Spicer offers a study of what doesn't happen.

His words: 

 "A sanctimonious — and detrimental — claim
The most egregious of their useless proposals revolve around the current the tax debate — whether to include the top 2 percent in reversing the Bush tax cuts. The sanctimonious claim is "this would hurt small business" — and this suggestion is incredibly wrong and even detrimental.

It is wrong for many reasons, mostly because it is fiction. It would not affect the huge majority of small businesses, to begin with. In a very cogent recent study, Scott Shane, the A. Malachi Mixon III Professor of Entrepreneurial Studies at Case Western Reserve University, plotted the average of all industries and businesses classified as "small business," with the average revenues at a little over $1.5 million annually, and the average income (on which taxes are paid) is about $100,500. This is far from the $250K target for increasing taxes on the wealthy (or small businesses). Moreover, almost all such businesses are classified as Sub-S corporations, and as such they pay no taxes at all (profits are prorated and passed through to the shareholders, of which there could be several or more, further diminishing the likelihood of $250K taxation)."

His credentials in his own words.

"After serving in the U.S. Air Force for three years of active duty, I was honorably discharged in 1957. A friend of mine owned a small Twin City ad agency, and having gone to flight school, he advised me that his largest account sold communications equipment to the Air Force. He asked me to join him. A few years later I became a partner in my own agency, and owned several more Minnesota agencies over the decades. From that day on I have been entrepreneurial, my own boss, and a quintessential small businessman. Additionally, I have owned small businesses in the aforementioned advertising, Twin Cities real estate, health care — and at 77 still own and operate my own successful local businesses today. That gives me well over half a century of expertise to share with you, and the right to point out that most of the proposals today are irrelevant, or worse, and the right proposals are being ignored."