"RB" wrote in message
...
Ed Huntress wrote:

snip

When do I get my cut of "Joe Plumber's" money?
Never, unless Joe starts netting more than $250,000 year off of his
plumbing business, which seems unlikely after listening to Joe.
However, if he *does* reach it, I'm going into plumbing right away.

If the small tax increase he'll be exposed to after he reaches
$250,000, until he gets up into the $1 million/year category, really
is enough to keep him from buying the business, then Joe doesn't have
enough behind him to go into business at all.

--
Ed Huntress

It was a valid question, although a hypothetical one. And he apparently
drew an incorrect conclusion from the answer.

But the point is that "Joe" was all set to be McCain's poster boy for the
last few weeks of the election -- until the revelations came out about
his name, his business status, his tax lien and so on. He's a dud poster
boy.

McCain's mistake was in focusing on "Joe", rather than the money quote:

"It's not that I want to punish your success. I just want to make sure
that everybody who is behind you, that they've got a chance for success
too," Obama responded. "My attitude is that if the economy's good for
folks from the bottom up, it's gonna be good for everybody ... I think
when you spread the wealth around, it's good for everybody."

Sure sounds like socialism to me.

That's because you've forgotten that we once had a higher social ethic, with
a sense of noblesse oblige even on the part of the newly well-off and a
steeply progressive income tax -- and the result, which was a lower Gini
number, a growing middle class, optimism for the future, blue-collar workers
able to send their kids to college and a lawn to mow and maybe a vacation in
the Bahamas every once in a while. We knew the difference between socialism,
which used to mean government ownership of businesses, and a civil society.

Now we have a fruit-loop economy that reads like something out of a
malevolent and trashy novel, wherein the rich own most of the assets that
aren't nailed down, and they have loaned us the rest at credit-card interest
rates that, when we were kids, would have drawn long prison terms for
usury -- Gordon Gecko's wet dream.

With socialism re-defined, real socialism either is so shocking that it
doesn't register, or no one has noticed that it's those masters of
capitalism, the conservative Republicans, that have brought us to this
brink, wherein the federal government is taking shares at gunpoint in the
country's largest banks. It turns out that the real socialists are the whack
jobs like Bush, Paulson, and the rest of their ilk that preach small
government while making it bigger; fiscal responsibility while driving the
national debt into a new order of magnitude; and who shun "nation building"
while building craven images of ourselves in the sand of ancient
civilizations half a world away, keeping order with the latest in
remote-controlled, unmanned weaponry aimed at insurgent cretins we don't
understand, from some trailer in Nevada.

Does it feel like the world has gotten stood on its head? That's because the
world has gotten stood on its head. War is peace, love is hate, greed is
good, and to hell with everyone else.

Say g'night, Gracie.

--
Ed Huntress