Please Help Joe the Plumber

As we face one of the worst economic crises in our history, Americans are wondering, What can we do to help Joe the Plumber? While Barack Obama showed he is out of touch during the last presidential debate by talking about health care, education, taxes, energy policy, 401ks, mortgages and other boring middle class issues most Americans don’t really care about, John McCain focused almost exclusively on the problems of Joe the Plumber. No matter what issue debate moderator Bob Scheiffer raised, McCain always brought it back to Joe the Plumber, and what a McCain presidency would do to make him richer.

Joe the Plumber (whose real name is Joe Wurzelbacher, which may be unpronounceable but at least sounds more American than Obama) came to the nation’s attention when Obama went traipsing through a suburban Ohio neighborhood whose residents breathed a sigh of relief when they realized he was just a presidential candidate and that they could unlock their doors and didn’t need to dial 911 after all. Joe went up to Obama and said, “I'm getting ready to buy a company that makes 250 to 280 thousand dollars a year. Your new tax plan is going to tax me more, isn't it?" It turns out that Joe the Plumber doesn't actually have an extra $250,000 yet, and would probably get a tax cut under Obama's plan, but Joe is a dreamer and he dreams that he will earn this money someday the good old-fashioned American way, by charging average Americans $100 an hour, including the time he has to wait around for his partner to get “special parts.”

Instead of telling Joe what he wanted to hear, which is what a politician experienced enough to be President would have done, Obama replied, "I’m gonna cut taxes a little bit more for the folks who are most in need and for the 5% of the folks who are doing very well – even though they’ve been working hard and I appreciate that – I just want to make sure they’re paying a little bit more in order to pay for those other tax cuts. . . . My attitude is that if the economy’s good for folks from the bottom up, it’s gonna be good for everybody. If you’ve got a plumbing business, you’re gonna be better off if you’ve got a whole bunch of customers who can afford to hire you, and right now everybody’s so pinched that business is bad for everybody and I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody."

The most famous plumber in America said he was not happy with Obama’s answer, calling it "a tap dance...almost as good as Sammy Davis, Jr," referring to the only black entertainer he could think of off the top of his head. If he had been given more time to come up with an answer he might also have said Obama “moonwalked like Michael Jackson,” “crooned like Nat King Cole,” “tickled the ivories like Stevie Wonder,” “twisted like Chubby Checkers,” “blew his horn like Dizzy Gillespie,” “talked jive like Cab Calloway,” “gave up the funk like George Clinton,” “rapped like Tupac Shakur,” or “shuffled like Step’n Fetchit.” Joe also told Fox News that he thought Obama’s answer was a “socialist viewpoint.”

It turns out that Joe is right. The idea that the wealthy should pay more taxes than the less well off, which economists call a “progressive tax system,” was proposed by Karl Marx in The Communist Manifesto, and he got the idea from socialist economist Adam Smith, who is also not American.

Why should people who are too lazy to make $250,000 get a tax cut, as most of them will under Obama’s tax plan, while people like Joe (in his dreams) and Exxon-Mobile Corporation will be left out in the cold? McCain thinks that’s unfair. “Joe, I want to tell you, I’ll not only help that — you buy that business that you worked your whole life for and be able — and I’ll keep your taxes low and I’ll provide available and affordable health care for you and your employees,” said McCain.

McCain didn’t say how he would specifically help Joe the Plumber, whether he will earmark some of the money he intends to use to take bad mortgages off the hands of banks so their CEOs will get their Christmas bonuses this year and use it to buy Joe’s business, whether he will temporarily suspend his presidency and ask Congress to pass special legislation to bail out Joe or whether he will ask his wife for permission to dip into her fortune to lend Joe the money personally. But the choice for the American people is clear: They can vote for Obama and greedily line their pockets with the tax cut they would get under Obama’s plan or they can vote for McCain and help Joe the Plumber. And since Joe is apparently not registered to vote himself, he is going to need you to vote for him.

I think Americans are a generous people and I am sure they wouldn’t mind sacrificing a little to help out Joe the Plumber. Once McCain gets into office and makes sure Joe the Plumber has gotten all the help he needs, then we can move on to solve some of the other less pressing problems with the economy.

Carnivals: Carnival of Taxes

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