Joe the plumber, whose first name is not Joe but Samuel, and whose last name is Wurzelbacher, holds no plumber’s license and has for 15 years worked in Ohio for another man with a plumbing business. He attained world wide notoriety for confronting Barack Obama face to face about the Obama tax plan to increase taxes on net incomes above $250,000 for joint filers and above $200,000 dollars for single filers. I am uncertain if Joe actually understood the intricacies of Obama’s tax plan, but the two words “tax increase” elicited a gut reaction in him.
The liberal media ferreted out Joe’s innermost secrets and embarrassments. We now know more about him than we ever wanted to know. Supposedly Joe owes the state of Ohio $1,200 dollars in back taxes. And while he indicated to Obama that he would like to one day own his boss’s plumbing business, Joe earns no more than $45,000 dollars a year, making his dream pie in the sky.
Liberals, including Nobel-winning economist Paul Krugman, are flummoxed by anyone in Joe the plumber’s financial state who buys into Republicans John McCain and Sarah Palin’s “rants” about Obama being inimical to small businesses. They argue the Obama tax plan would shake down oligarchs, a paltry 2 percent of the American population, to benefit 95 percent of working Americans, including most Joe plumbers, painters, roofers and vegetable vendors. Krugman wrote in his New York Times column that under the Obama plan, “a typical plumber would pay lower taxes and have a better chance of getting health insurance.”
Yet many Joe plumbers do not find Obama’s tax plan irresistible. Some Democratic pundits note irately this paradox, whereby poor Americans vote against the health of their own pocket books. They say it is the result of Republicans mastering scary words like “socialism” and “wealth distribution ” to manipulate the masses and divert them from the reality of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer, much to the detriment of America.
I see the Joe plumber paradox in a different light. It is rooted in the proclivity Americans have for big and often unattainable dreams.
Joe the plumber is not thinking, “Half my life is already over. I am never going to make enough money to buy my boss’s business.”
He’s thinking instead, “Maybe my boss will write me in his will as one of the inheritors of his accumulated wealth. May be he’ll grow tired of this business one day and sell it to me for a song and a dance. Maybe my affluent aunt will die and leave me her estate so that I can buy myself a business better than what my boss can sell me. Maybe I’ll put my money on the next horse to win the Triple Crown and laugh all the way to the bank.”
Joe the plumber, a true American, while planning for this contingency of striking it rich, will forget that he is actually not so well off. If not for himself, he will build castles in the air for his son or daughter. With the first A his son earns in second grade science he will see in the boy a prodigy who will amass wealth as a famous cardiac surgeon in Manhattan. In the first scribbles of his daughter he will see a budding novelist with a million dollar advance from a reputable publisher jingling in her pocket at the ripe age of 20.
Insane as this sounds, Joe the plumber does not want government to tax the wealth he, his son or his daughter are yet to make or may never make. His attachment to this insubstantial money is probably even more potent than his connection to the amount he has on hand. Hence, his aversion to the Obama plan.
This the Republicans know and exploit and this the Democrats fail to even understand!
Usha Nellore is a writer living in Bel Air. Reach her at [email protected].
