Joe the Plumber

We know him as Joe the Plumber. About a week ago he had a chat with Senator Obama on a rope line. Senator Obama was doing house to house campaigning in Joe’s Toledo, Ohio, neighborhood. Joe thought this would be a great opportunity to ask questions and get answer’s from the horse’s mouth, so to speak.

Joe has a dream to buy the company he works for. The company makes in the vicinity of $250,000 a year. Joe would buy more equipment and hire more plumbers to work for him. If he couldn’t hire more plumbers at first, then over the course of his ownership he would. Provided of course, that the tax bite wouldn’t prohibit him doing so.

Joe may have influenced the course of the election because of this question. He became the "flavor of the week" and his name was invoked more than a few times during the final debate between Senators McCain and Obama. The press began investigating his personal life and found some things that have become fodder for the liberals. But, that’s not a problem for anyone except Joe. As Joe himself has said, he’s a flash in the pan and will be forgotten in a few days.

You know what the problem really is?

The problem is with the answer that Obama gave Joe. There can be no doubt about just what Obama said because it was caught on tape (it’s on YouTube) and revealed that Obama is a true liberal, if not Socialist. Oh, my goodness! She used the “S” word!! Yep, I did. You see, Obama said that by taxing people who are successful, the money can be used to help those who come behind. Obama thinks it’s “good to spread the wealth around.”

A little history is needed here to explain just why this is Socialism or Marxism, or Communism. They aren’t the same, but are somewhat interchangeable. This is what I found at Wikipedia (the bold is mine):

Karl Marx, father of Marxism said: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need (or needs) is a slogan popularized by Karl Marx in his 1875 Critique of the Gotha Program.[1] The phrase summarizes the principles that, under a communist system, every person should contribute to society to the best of their ability and consume from society in proportion to their needs, regardless of how much they have contributed.

Note that last line: regardless of how much they have contributed. So the person who produces more will provide for those who produce less. I think the idea was that the farmer will produce the meat, vegetables, and dairy, the weaver will produce cloth, the carpenter houses and so on. They would share their products and use what they needed. Now that is under ideal conditions when everyone plays according to the rules. How often do you see that happening in today’s world?

But, what about those who contribute more than others, or those who are lazy and contribute little to nothing. We all know people who fit both descriptions. Under a Socialistic society, even the people who contribute little, will get their share, according to their needs. And if anyone notices that one person is getting a share, but they didn’t contribute, or contributed less than others, under a liberal, Socialistic system, they will be told that they should get more because they have less than the others. It has to be fair to all.

I work for local government. I have often said that no one is ever going to get rich working for government, but if you stay at it long enough, and spend less than you earn, you will get to a point where you are doing very nicely for yourself. When I mentioned opportunities, that might included additional job training, or even leaving one job for better opportunities somewhere else.

Back to “spreading the wealth”. Socialism wants to take money from the wage earners and give it to those who aren’t, or who aren’t making as much as the wage earner the money was taken from. It’s to bring one group of people to a higher level and make more things equal. How does it make it equal to give something to one person that another person earned?

About twenty some years ago, my agency decided to adjust the pay grades. I had been working for the agency for three years at the time. Two other women had just started in my office. I had trained them and had to take up the slack until they were able to take up their part of the load. When the new pay grades were announced, we were all being paid at the same rate. The agency had raised their level to mine. Was this fair? Not in my eyes, but it was fine with the two new employees who each had less than six months on the job compared to my three years of experience.

There was nothing equal about our jobs. I had been there longer, I had to train them, and I was producing more work, but we were all paid at the same rate of pay. I was told that my pay rate was used to raise the entry-level pay rate, and it just wasn’t thought completely thought out. I was further told that I should have received a higher pay raise than I got; it was a human error that was eventually corrected.

While I would never consider what happened to me to be anything but a mistake, I realized that it was an example of what would happen under a Socialistic society. I was the one producing, the others were not, and were getting more than they contributed. Yes, later on, the other two women would have been contributing as much as I did, but at first, they weren’t, simply because they couldn’t.

Can’t you see the Democratic controlled Congress deciding to help the poor by taking money from your paycheck and giving it to them in the form of stimulus checks, rebate checks, tax credits? Obama has said that he will give tax cuts to 95% of the American workforce. But, approximately 40% of the American workforce doesn’t pay taxes now. How can you give tax cuts to people who don’t pay taxes? One way is through payroll cuts. Okay, that’s a good one that will hopefully cut my payroll taxes too. You’ve got me on that one.

But, Obama also has a whole bundle of new programs he wants to start. If he cuts taxes where is the money coming from to pay for these programs? The money used to pay for the Iraq war isn’t coming from tax money so it can’t be from there. It has to come from new taxes.And that will be on people and businesses that earn more than $250,000.

And we come back to Joe the Plumber and people like him who either have small businesses or have a dream to own one. If they are taxed more, they will not be able to hire more people, buy more inventory, or expand their businesses. They may even have to close their business because they can’t pay the taxes.

And how does that help anyone?