I'm familiar with most of those resources. Do any of them support your claim that tax levels make no impact on hiring or wage growth? Separately, since we're exchanging data source recommendations, I'd also suggest looking at non-government provided data sources when researching things like the impact of higher taxes. :)

Ask any business owner how doubling taxes would affect their decisions on hiring, providing bonuses or bumping their employees salaries after they wrap up their fiscal year with lower net profit and less cash available in the bank.

You made general statements like "relatively few are (real businesses)" when the latest SBA report shows 5.8 M with employees. Regardless of how many are real businesses or not, 63% of net new jobs came from them. Your Pew study says "The likelihood that a self-employed worker will hire other workers has diminished over time" which supports my case that it's become less attractive to hire and we should enact policies to incentivize new hires because we're losing a good source of new jobs. I'm not disputing that the majority of the ~20M nonemployers aren't likely to hire, but we're still talking about millions we can activate that have never hired and 5.8 M that could make more hires with the right policies.

You disputed the fact that 80% of ALL businesses had no employees. The SBA report states that small businesses comprise of 99.9% of all firms so yes your slight misquote is effectively true - 80% of businesses are nonemployers. I laid out a bunch of occupations each with a range of numbers. For just one occupation, electricians - there are 628,800 (https://www.bls.gov/ooh/construction-and-extraction/electric...) Carpenters = 945,400. Not all are registered businesses of course but there's a meaningful chunk that could hire either full time or part time. Anyway - I have no reason to doubt that 80% of small/all businesses counted by the SBA have no employees. That's about 23M people, excluding those small businesses with partners and no employees. Completely believable.

There are a few things preventing the capable nonemployers from hiring:

"Two of the business characteristics that correlated with an increased likelihood of hiring a first employee were the availability of assets and incorporation." [1] Assets go down with higher taxes.

"Non-employers who received entrepreneurial training were more likely to add a first employee than those who did not." [1]. Small sample size but makes sense. Most nonemployers try to do everything and need to understand how to offload low value tasks so they can focus on high value tasks to grow their business.

Regarding tax implications, here's just one study from The Hartford:

"If taxes rise further, the majority (66 percent) of small-business owners plan to deal with it by passing the added costs on to their customers. More than half (58 percent) will postpone plans to expand their businesses, 55 percent will cut back on personal investments in their companies and 54 percent will institute a hiring freeze. Just 28 percent plan to cut back on existing staff." [2]

From the 2015 study - "small business owners are most concerned that healthcare reform and tax reform will impact the cost of running their business." [3] and 37% say taxes present a major risk to their business.

[1] https://www.sba.gov/content/crossing-employer-threshold-dete...

[2] https://www.americanexpress.com/us/small-business/openforum/... (2012)

[3] https://www.thehartford.com/sites/the_hartford/files/executi... (2015)