Before Joe the Plumber's fifteen minutes are up, I'd like to point out a small fact that the MSM won't tell you and most people don't get. 

Joe has his wrench in a twist because:

"I'm getting ready to buy a company that makes 250 to 280 thousand dollars a year," Wurzelbacher said. "Your new tax plan is going to tax me more, isn't it?" 

And Obama answered him truthfully, "It is true that from 250 up - from 250 - 300 or so, so for that additional amount, you'd go from 36 to 39%, which is what it was under Bill Clinton."

Obama was telling you the truth, but I'd suggest you go have a chat with your accountant, because here's what most people don't get (and, by "most people," I, of course mean "me, before I was forced to take Income Tax during my second year in law school"): that top rate will apply only to income over $250,000.  Got that Joe?  No?  Let me break it down for you. 

If your company's taxable income--not gross, taxable, i.e. your income after all your business deductions like salaries and expensed capital costs and insurance and a zillion other things are subtracted--is $280,000.00, well first of all, congratulations, because you're doing a hell of a lot better than me and I'm an overpaid attorney.  But hey, Joe, its okay.  I'm not begrudging you the extra income, because what you do is more important than what I do.  True, we both deal with other people's crap for a living, but, on the whole you deserve to make more because I deal with metaphorical crap and you deal with the real thing.  I may keep civilization from crumbling by giving people a way to solve disputes without resorting to violence, but you make civilization possible.  Good plumbing is the very flower of civilization and the thought of living without makes me shudder.  (Although I do think public defenders ought to make more than both of us, because the metaphorical crap they deal with is worse than my metaphorical crap or even your real crap.  But I digress.)

Okay, so let's say you've got your new business going and you have 280 large you've got to pay taxes on.  Well, that's a hell of a great problem to have, but it's a problem, nonetheless.  The good news is that that top tax bracket you're all upset about Obama wanting to change only applies to income over 250K.  Got that?  You're only paying the top rate on 30,000.00 of your 280K in income.  On the rest of your income, you pay the exact same tax as some poor schmoe scraping by on $249,999.49 a year under the current system and that won't change under Obama's plan (though taxes on that part may go down for everyone, but I understand you're worried about that top bracket, so let's set that aside). 

As to that last 30K, right now the rate on it is 36%.  That means if the Bush tax cuts are extended, you would give $10,800.00 of that last 30K to Uncle Sam.  Yeah, I know.  Ouch.  But hey, we all started getting used to it the first time we got a paycheck and saw the stub.  Suck it up and work with me, here.  Obama wants to let the rate applicable to that last 30K go back up to 39%, where it was under Clinton.  So under Obama's plan, you'd end up paying $11,700 on that 30K. 

Horror of horrors, Joe!  Obama wants you to give up an extra nine hundred of your two hundred and eighty thousand dollars!  Geez, I can already see your whole business plan crumbling before your eyes. 

Well, you know, Joe, lots of Americans are going to have a hard time crying with you, especially the ones who've recently paid a bill for your very necessary nonetheless hideously expensive services.  But the truth is, between Obama's middle class tax cuts (i.e. cuts on the rates applicable to the other 250K), his assistance to small businesses who provide health insurance for their employees and the reduction in health care costs that will hit once we can stop using Level I trauma centers as walk-in clinics for the uninsured, you're tax bill is almost certainly going to go down and you're business income is going to go up.  Or, hell, for that matter, incorporate the damn thing as an S corp, pay yourself half that 280K in salary and deduct it as a business expense, pay the rest to yourself as a capital gain and you're out of the top bracket on that salary and paying a capital gains rate on rest.  (Okay, actually, I'm way past my area of expertise here.  This isn't legal advice and you're not my client and you really need to check all this with your own lawyer, but I guaran-damn-tee you that in all the history of progressive income tax, there has never, ever, ever been a person whose had as little income in the top bracket as you're forecasting who didn't find a way to push his AGI down below, or at least mighty close to, the top bracket's threshold level.)

So, look, I know that's all detail-laden and complicated and not at all the kind of simple answer to a simple question that you crave, but, the belief that all of our problems are simple and all of them have a simple answer is the very essence of the Republican delusion that's gotten the country got into the mess its in now.  Life if complicated, government is complicated, business is complicated and, above all, taxes are complicated.  I'm sure you know that.   

Oh, and Joe?  Good luck voting, buddy.  Looks like your name's misspelled in Ohio's voter database and, thanks to the vote suppression tactics your party has been busily implementing for the last eight years, that could be a problem.  I'd look into that, if I were you.