MattMaroon.com

One thing playing so much poker ingrained in me was the tendency to use logic first and then decide. That’s counter to human nature, as most people make decisions and then rationalize them with the best available logic. Nobody is perfect at this, and I still sometimes catch myself doing it even when I have the time to think things through.

I think, in the end, that is why the whole Joe the Plumber thing has really not done anything for the McCain camp. It’s done a lot for Joe, but it’s largely fallen flat with the electorate. I’d like to say it’s because America is smart enough not to take financial advice from some unknown plumber, but they’ll take medical advice from a stripper so that clearly can’t be it.

Joe the Plumber decided he was a McCain voter before he asked Obama the question that made him infamous. We discovered the day after the debate that he makes about $40k a year (which is low for a plumber) and is in debt to the government, which means there’s a pretty solid chance he’s in debt elsewhere since usually the first collector you pay is the IRS. They can throw you in jail, whereas the rest can’t do anything but call you repeatedly.

And the business he is allegedly going to buy has $510k in sales and 8 employees, meaning that after expenses, if you assume Joe’s salary to be company average (it certainly cannot be high, as the average plumber makes about $7k more than he does) they’d make $190k a year. That’s not even counting non-employee expenses. Rent, utilities equipment, vans, etc. There’s almost no chance that company is making anywhere near $250k.

So, in reality, Joe the Plumber is literally six tax brackets away from getting paying more under Obama’s plan. Seriously, six brackets. Look it up, I’m not joking. In fact, Joe would get a 3.6% decrease under the Obama tax plan. That’s compared to the 0.5% decrease he’d get under McCain. And even if he is able to buy the business, which he presumably is nowhere near, and even if it did make $250k a year, which it almost certainly doesn’t, he’d probably still end up just barely ahead with Obama’s tax plan.

It might seem a little odd, then, that Joe was so worried about what Obama was going to tax people who make six times what he does. It’s because Joe, like most people, wasn’t logically deciding who he should vote for. He was trying to rationalize a decision he’d already made. You can’t be opposed to Obama’s plan, or prefer it to McCain’s, unless you’re in or near the top two tax brackets, so he invented a scenario in which he’d suddenly be catapulted up there. Sadly for him, and maybe more so for McCain, it’s fiction.

At this point, for Joe to improve McCain’s polling results, he’d have to do two things. First, and most likely, he’d have to swing undecided voters to the McCain side. Second, he’d have to swing Obama voters to undecided or McCain.

The first group of people are probably too cautious and spend too much time thinking about it to be swayed by a plumber. The second group is an even tougher sell. Most people who’ve decided one way or the other by now aren’t switching for nearly anything. Nothing short of the police finding a dead stripper in their candidate’s trunk is going to make a difference.

The Obama voters (like the McCain ones) have either spent months thinking about it and come to a decision, or they’ve decided and then spent months rationalizing. Either way you’d have to invalidate their logic to convince them they were wrong. Not just some of it, but most, and that’s really tough to do on the topic of tax policy since 95% of them will be getting a decrease.

Also, most people aren’t rich, and most people aren’t going to be buying the company they work for in the next 4 years. And unlike Joe the Plumber, who is either overtly dishonest or self-delusional, they know it. What they do know is that their household makes $50k per year and they’re struggling to get by. If you tell them that taxing rich people more and them less is socialism, their answer is going to be "well hell, let’s give that whole Marxism thing a try."

I also find the socialism buzzword hilarious, because the only socialism I’ve seen lately is the bailout, and that was supported by both candidates and our current President. If there’s one good thing you can say about Bush, it’s that he most definitely is not a socialist. Socialism is predicated upon state ownership and administration of the means of production. Government taking ownership stakes in banks and possibly automobile manufacturers qualifies. Raising taxes does not.

So on behalf of Ohioans everywhere, I’d like to apologize for this most egregious atrocity. Now it’s your turn Alaska.