Joe The Plumber or Sam The Con Man?

In the final death throws of the McCain election campaign, Joe The Plumber has been used by McCain and Palin as what they hope will be the magic bullet to turn things around.

Unfortunately those pesky facts keep cropping up that detract from the lies they are trying to sell to the American people.

They have tried to paint Joe The Plumber as a good old working man, who is frightened of Obama's radical plan to pay for stuff, using taxes. Perhaps they prefer the Bush approach of simply borrowing money from foreign countries, not paying them back, and bilking poor people out of as much as they can get off them. Thus continuing to widen the gap between rich and poor.

So now that Joe The Plumber has had his 15 minutes of fame, this is what the media have discovered about him:

• Joe The Plumber is not a plumber. In so far as he doesn't have a license to be a plumber (despite over a decade in the industry). Until he obtains one, he would not be able to buy a plumbing business and operate it, as he described in his fantasy to Barack Obama.
• Joe The Plumber is not called Joe. His name is in fact Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher. Not quite as catchy as Joe The Plumber.
• He told a conservative web site that trying to catch Barack Obama off guard was his intent, it was not just a chance meeting, he had a specific agenda.
• It turns out that his worries about tax may go beyond the story. Because apparently he has underpaid his own taxes by about $1,200. In fact this matter is so serious, the state has put a lien on his home.
  
• It seems he could also benefit from some Obama help with health care, since he owes $1,200 to a hospital, and has not paid them.
• When it was first discovered he was not a licensed plumber, Joe The Plumber claimed he worked under his bosses plumbing license. But under Ohio building regulations Joe The Plumber cannot do plumbing work without getting a plumbers license. So Joe The Plumber may in fact be working illegally.
  
• Although he is now a registered Republican, he was up until 2007 registered with the Natural Law Party.
• Comic Bill Maher pointed out, in his 15 minutes of fame, Wurzelbacher has already done more interviews than Palin.

So it seems that the McCain campaign vetted Joe The Plumber about as thoroughly as McCain vetted Palin.

This guy they are trying to elevate to hero status, is clearly no hero. But he is a tax dodging con man who masquerades as a plumber, but in fact breaks the law if he does any actual plumbing.

Joe The Plumber isn't even close to his fantasy of earning in the top 5% of Americans. He is sadly using the same old logic that causes millions of poor people to vote for the Bush and McCain's of this world. The belief that if they vote against their own interests for long enough, they will get lucky and get rich. At which point they can be a part of the 'trickle down' theory that Bush and McCain support.

The fact is, Joe The Plumber would have benefited from Obama's policies, had they been in effect for the past few years. Maybe with lower taxes he would not have run up that tax bill that now sits as a lien on his home. Maybe with better medical coverage he wouldn't owe that hospital $1,200. Perhaps with the other initiatives Obama has suggested, he could have obtained his plumber's license, so he didn't have to break the law.

John McCain stated that the winner of the last presidential debate was Joe The Plumber. Let's hope that's true. Let's hope that the Joe The Plumbers of this country begin to see that they are making a mistake by electing someone who wants to copy Bush's fiscal policy.

UPDATE: According to this article, it has been suggested that Samuel The Fake Plumber actually makes somewhere between $40K and $70K, and so would face a tax cut under President Obama not the tax hike he fears.

According to Bureau of Labor Statistics' 2006 National Compensation Survey, pipelayers, plumbers, pipefitters and steamfitters nationwide made an average of $23 an hour, or about $46,000 annually for a typical 40-hour workweek.