Is "Joe the plumber" middle class?
John McCain was widely criticized after the first two debates for never mentioning the middle class. So during the last debate he came up with what seems to be a way of mentioning "middle class" without really talking about the middle class.
Meet "Joe the plumber", the subject of much of last night's debate. When you hear his "name", you immediately imagine the middle class, even the lower middle class. And he'd be paying a 3% higher tax under Obama? How can Obama put a higher tax burden on a plumber? If he does that to a plumber, surely clerks, janitors, cab drivers and other middle class folks would be affected as well...
However, Joe is an exceptional plumber, being able to buy the business that's making at least $250.000 a year. That's certainly good for Joe, but it means that through his successful hard work he has managed to move out of the middle class and into the top 5%.
So the subject of much of last night's debate was actually Bush/McCain's tax breaks for the upper class, which is nothing new. But by referring to this borderline case, McCain has, I think pretty successfully, sold it as "helping the middle class".
And I think this caught most people by surprise, including Obama, who seemed to fall for the trick and continued talking about "Joe" instead of saying: "Hey, that's upper class, they're doing just fine already and will continue to do so. Now let's talk about the middle class, the hurting majority!"
Pundits seem to have missed it as well. And I think McCain will continue to get credit for this instead of it being recognized as something that could well be called another deception (albeit a more clever one than most).
Meet "Joe the plumber", the subject of much of last night's debate. When you hear his "name", you immediately imagine the middle class, even the lower middle class. And he'd be paying a 3% higher tax under Obama? How can Obama put a higher tax burden on a plumber? If he does that to a plumber, surely clerks, janitors, cab drivers and other middle class folks would be affected as well...
However, Joe is an exceptional plumber, being able to buy the business that's making at least $250.000 a year. That's certainly good for Joe, but it means that through his successful hard work he has managed to move out of the middle class and into the top 5%.
So the subject of much of last night's debate was actually Bush/McCain's tax breaks for the upper class, which is nothing new. But by referring to this borderline case, McCain has, I think pretty successfully, sold it as "helping the middle class".
And I think this caught most people by surprise, including Obama, who seemed to fall for the trick and continued talking about "Joe" instead of saying: "Hey, that's upper class, they're doing just fine already and will continue to do so. Now let's talk about the middle class, the hurting majority!"
Pundits seem to have missed it as well. And I think McCain will continue to get credit for this instead of it being recognized as something that could well be called another deception (albeit a more clever one than most).
