Thoughts in a Haystack

Joe the plumber is not likely to slow John McCain's passage through the porcelain exit. It seems Joe's savings under McCain's tax plan wouldn't even pay off the back taxes Joe already owes to Ohio ... even assuming Joe really earned enough to go over $250,000 in taxable earnings.

Wurzelbacher told Obama Oct. 12 as the Illinois senator canvassed his neighborhood that he was about to buy a business that earns as much as $280,000 a year.

But that doesn't appear to be true:

The company McCain said the plumber wants to buy has annual sales of $510,000, according to an analysis by Dun & Bradstreet. That makes it unlikely that Wurzelbacher's purchase would give him a taxable income of more than $200,000 -- leaving him unaffected by Obama's proposal to roll back tax breaks for those earning more than $250,000, said Steven Bankler, a certified public accountant in San Antonio, who counts plumbers and other trade professionals as his clients.

But even if Joe somehow got that $280,000 in adjusted gross income:

... he would pay just $773 more in taxes under Obama's plan than McCain's ... according to an analysis by the Tax Foundation, a Washington research group that is critical of high taxes.

On the other hand:

Wurzelbacher hasn't paid the taxes he already owes, according to the state of Ohio, which placed a tax lien against him for $1,182.98 on Jan. 26, 2007, that is still active.

As the Bloomberg story says:

The problem for McCain, tax analysts said, is that the underlying premise that Wurzelbacher would face higher taxes under Obama is neither true nor typical of how the vast majority of small businesses would fare.

It looks like Joe the plumber is no more likely than Sarah Palin to help McCain be flush rather than to be flushed.
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