History is Happening Now

I hate to step on Lee’s excellent blog below on Joe the Plumber, but I just couldn’t resist posting these excerpts from a relevant New York Times article.

First off, the man with the all-American, working-class-sounding name and the all-American, working-class-sounding job is apparently violating the law. Did it occur to John McCain to check into this guy’s record before McCain made Joe the Plumber the mascot of his whole campaign?

Thomas Joseph, the business manager of Local 50 of the United Association of Plumbers, Steamfitters and Service Mechanics, based in Toledo, said Thursday that Mr. Wurzelbacher had never held a plumber’s license, which is required in Toledo and several surrounding municipalities. He also never completed an apprenticeship and does not belong to the plumber’s union, which has endorsed Mr. Obama. On Thursday, he acknowledged that he does plumbing work even though he does not have a license.

Furthermore, Mr. Joe the Plumber has no understanding of Obama’s tax plan.

Mr. Wurzelbacher told reporters that the company he works for, Newell Plumbing & Heating, has two full-time employees: himself and the owner, Al Newell.

Neither Mr. Newell nor Mr. Wurzelbacher responded to telephone calls. And Mr. Wurzelbacher has provided only vague information on his and the company’s finances since talking to Mr. Obama. But if the plumbing business remained a two-person company and the net proceeds — after deductions for business expenses — were shared by the two men, both incomes would most likely fall well below the top tax brackets on which Mr. Obama wants to raise rates, as would the company itself.

Both, in fact, would probably be eligible for a tax cut, said Bob Williams, senior research associate at the independent, nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, though the cut would probably be greater under Mr. McCain’s tax plan than Mr. Obama’s.

According to public records, Mr. Wurzelbacher has been subject to two liens, each over $1,100. One, with a hospital, has been settled, but a tax lien with the State of Ohio is still outstanding.

In his interview with Ms. Couric, Mr. Wurzelbacher, who voted Republican in Ohio’s March primary, said that his encounter with Mr. Obama had been prompted by his desire “to ask one of these guys a question, and really corner them and get them to answer a question for once instead of tap dancing around it. And unfortunately I asked the question, but I still got a tap dance.”

He added, “He was almost as good as Sammy Davis Jr.”

I pay my taxes. Most people I know pay their taxes. I would like to ask Joe the Plumber to please pay his taxes. Is that too much to ask?

I certainly wouldn’t go so far as to ask Joe the Plumber to educate himself about Barack Obama’s tax plan before accusing Obama of “tap dancing” around Joe’s stupid, ignorant questions. That would be too much to ask.

But could you please pay your taxes? And could you please get a plumber’s license? Please?

UPDATE: A CBS news report says Joe the Plumber is acknowledging that Obama’s tax plan wouldn’t force him to pay more in taxes:

Wurzelbacher said Obama’s tax plan wouldn’t affect him right now, because he doesn’t make $250,000. “But I hope someday I’ll make that,” he said.

“If you believed (Obama), I’d be receiving his tax cuts,” Wurzelbacher said. “But I don’t look at it that way. He’d still be hurting others.”

Let me get this straight: Joe the Plumber tells Obama that Obama’s tax plan would prevent him from buying a business. Then John McCain goes on television and tells the whole country that Obama’s tax plan will prevent Joe the Plumber from buying a business — thereby preventing Joe the Plumber from creating new jobs. Then, it comes out that actually Obama’s plan wouldn’t raise Joe the Plumber’s taxes, but would probably reduce them. And this is Joe’s response: “He’d still be hurting others.”

Joe the Plumber is helping John McCain lie to the American public. When confronted with a blatant lie that he started, Joe the Plumber says, “I don’t look at it that way.”

I’m thinking Joe the Plumber will probably vote Republican this year. The Republicans are more his style.

Parts of last night’s debate revolved around a conversation Barack Obama had with a guy in Ohio named Joe Wurzelbacher, who is about to buy a business that is apparently going to have its taxes increased under Obama’s tax plan.  Speaking to Nightline’s Terry Moran, Joe — who says that Social Security is a joke that he “hates” — said:  “To be honest with you, that infuriates me.  It’s not right for someone to decide you made too much—that you’ve done too good and now we’re going to take some of it back.”

Joe obviously doesn’t mean what he says.  Joe is happy enough to have the market decide that you made too much, to take away money from you — the market’s deciding your job is worthless doesn’t infuriate him one bit, because (apparently) it is inherently just and/or infallible.  What infuriates him is if tax policy is designed to disproportionately help people (and businesses) who make less money than him (and his).  If the people, through the instrument of their elected government, make this decision then and only then does Joe become infuriated.  What Joe is really saying is:  “I resent the fact that someone might prevent me from taking everything I can via the mechanism of the market.”  Joe’s position only makes sense if you accept the infallibility — or at least the justice — of the market.  It depends on the idea that externalities do not exist — that the costs of transactions ought not include information about anyone other than the buyer or seller.  Does your company pollute our river?  “Well, that doesn’t matter — that’s just between me and my customers.”  Tax the pollution your business produces?  “Well, it infuriates me if you think I’m making too much!”

By his own (apparent) definition of someone deciding “you made too much,” Joe must also be furious about some other evil forms of income transfer:  public schools, public utilities, the federal highway system, parks, government spending on R&D, the Pentagon system, food stamps and other government assistance programs, not to mention Social Security.  All of these projects use tax money to create public systems that — overwhelmingly — disproportionately help those less fortunate than Joe.  Joe apparently believes that those who receive food stamps are, as the Wall Street Journal labels those who don’t pay income taxes, “lucky ducks,” and are perhaps simply insufficiently good at earning money for themselves on the market.  Those grindingly poor food stamp-using lucky ducks!  I’m sure Joe would trade places with them in an instant.

Also implicit in Joe’s comment is the idea that he earned all his money without the help of the abovementioned systems.  I have no doubt that Joe worked very hard to get where he is — and he absolutely ought to be rewarded for his effort and sacrifice — but Joe did not just spontaneously and in a frontiersman-like way create wealth from scratch.  His wealth was created partly with the help of other people — and their taxes — through many of the systems described above.  Is it infuriating to Joe that the government took money away from people without children to pay for his public education, that the government invested in building the highways he uses to get around Ohio, that the government funds the R&D that helps create world-class technology and wealth, that the government supports farmers who are probably among the clients of the plumbing company he is about to buy?

Just asking.

We’re through the third of three debates, and by all accounts Obama has won all of them–a remarkable feat.  I wanted to comment on the debate’s final exchange regarding school vouchers.  McCain made the claim that “I’ve got to tell you that vouchers, where they are requested and where they are agreed to, are a good and workable system. And it’s been proven.”  Courtesy of Ezra Klein, I direct you to this Greg Anrig Washington Monthly article on the failure of school vouchers:

[I]n recent months, almost unnoticed by the mainstream media, the school voucher movement has abruptly stalled. Some stalwart advocates of vouchers have either repudiated the idea entirely or considerably tempered their enthusiasm for it. Exhibit A is “School Choice Isn’t Enough,” an article in the winter 2008 City Journal (the quarterly published by the conservative Manhattan Institute) written by the former voucher proponent Sol Stern. Acknowledging that voucher programs for poor children had “hit a wall,” Stern concluded: “Education reformers ought to resist unreflective support for elegant-sounding theories, derived from the study of economic activity, that don’t produce verifiable results in the classroom.” His conversion has triggered an intense debate in conservative circles. The center-right education scholar Chester E. Finn Jr., president of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation and a longtime critic of public school bureaucracies and teachers unions, told the New York Sun that he was sympathetic to Stern’s argument. In his newly published memoirs, Finn also writes of his increasing skepticism that “the market’s invisible hand” produces improved performance on its own. Howard Fuller, an African American who was the superintendent of schools in Milwaukee when the voucher program was launched there, and who received substantial support from the Bradley Foundation and other conservative institutions over the years, has conceded, “It hasn’t worked like we thought it would in theory.”

Anrig goes on to write that:

Utimately, the voucher experiments confirmed what their critics had asserted all along. The heart of the problem with our urban schools is neither the education bureaucracies nor teachers unions, as Chubb, Moe, and many other voucher advocates have contended, flawed though those institutions may be. Instead, as the sociologist James S. Coleman found in the 1960s, a student’s family’s income and the collective social and economic background of his classmates are by far the most important influences on his academic future. Not only do lower-income students tend to score relatively poorly, children of any background who attend high-poverty schools are far more likely to produce worse test results than they would in schools with primarily middle-class students. America’s urban school systems remain almost universally dysfunctional, primarily because the country as a whole is about as segregated by race and income as at any time since the civil rights revolution.

There’s a lot more to say about vouchers, obviously, but the fundamental point remains:  the invisible hand of the market is not the answer to all our problems.  In the case of services like education and military spending and utilities, the public sector may yield the most efficient results and the market may be an utter failure.  Even the staunchest advocates of vouchers are beginning to agree.

Government is sometimes the answer.