It's a mainstay of conservative orthodoxy that tax cuts create jobs. In fact, the complexity of the tax code does create jobs for high-priced tax attorneys and accountants. But do tax cuts create "real" jobs?

The answer appears to be no for companies big and small. After all, U.S. public companies pay well-below the official 35% tax rate while 13.5 million American workers search unsuccessfully for jobs And start ups tell me that tax cuts don't affect whether they'll create new jobs. In short, the tax cut rhetoric, while effective politics, is lousy economics.

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So tax cuts have not spurred big companies to create jobs. But what about start ups? Based on my October 2010 interviews with 17 start up CEOs, my conclusion is that not a single one of them would create a job based on tax cuts. All of them told me that their decision to create a new job would be based on whether the long-term cost of that new job would be offset by higher revenues and profits.