Take Professor Warren’s assertion that of Massachusetts’s small-business owners, “not one of them, not one, made big bucks from the risky bets that brought down our economy.” On the face of it, this is clearly false: I’m sure many small-business owners in Massachusetts are successful enough to have savings in their stock portfolios or some home equity, and they thus profited from the run-up in asset prices. Those gains were either tantamount to or resultant from the “risky bets” that Warren rues.
But there are plenty of other ways that small-business owners benefited from the culture of “risky bets” and unregulated finance. Easy credit and low interest rates benefited any business owners who needed access to credit (i.e., almost all of them). Rising home prices and the shockingly ready availability of home-equity loans gave many of them capital to start or expand small businesses; indeed, in doing so, they were making “risky bets” of their own, and good for them. And what about the small-business owners who make wooden boats or artisanal vodka or offer thousand-dollar-an-hour SAT courses? I’m pretty sure they were happy to see the explosion of wealth in the first few years of this century; indeed, without it, those businesses would never have existed.
But her next line is even more mendacious: Of all the nurses, programmers, salespeople, and firefighters she’s met, “not one of them, not one,” she blusters, “stashes their money in the Cayman Islands to avoid paying their fair share of taxes.” Of course she’s technically right that none of them does that personally — but people in all these professions benefit from the profits of high finance, tax-evasion schemes, and more.
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