If you care.
You can count the number of times "Joe the plumber" was mentioned.
Photo from NYT, Obama and Joe, in discussion. So Joe, actually Sam, (although we're a permissive country and he can go by his second name and call himself Joe), is Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher who is a real and an actual person, and not an ivention of rhetoric.
If his business grossed $250,000; he'd probably be below a threshold in the Obama plan; whereas if it netted him that amount - he is in a more rarefied income level than most of us who thinking in our best interests should rather be under a graduaated tax system where the marginal thousands of those earning a lot are taxed at a higher rate to allow sufficient income to fund government services while allowing the bracket structure at the lower end to be adjusted downward to benefit as Obama says the "95% of Americans" he would favor as opposed to the other top 1 - 5% that Bush-McCain tax policy shines on.
That above NYT link to the debate transcript has a link over to a YouTube video of Obama and Joe. And here's NYT reporting:
But he became the hero of conservatives and Republicans when he stopped Mr. Obama, who was campaigning on his street, and asked whether he believed in the American dream. Mr. Wurzelbacher said he was concerned about having to pay higher taxes as an owner of a small business.
“I’m getting ready to buy a company that makes $250,000 to $280,000 a year,” he told Mr. Obama. “Your new tax plan is going to tax me more, isn’t it?”
That encounter wound up on YouTube and led to appearances on the Fox News Channel, interviews with conservative bloggers and a New York Post editorial, all of whom seized on a small part of Mr. Obama’s long reply. “I think that when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody,” Mr. Obama had said.
Mr. McCain invoked Mr. Wurzelbacher in Wednesday’s debate as a way to criticize Mr. Obama’s tax plan and wealth-sharing argument, and picked up the theme again on Thursday.
“You know what Senator Obama had to say to Joe? That he wanted to spread his wealth around,” Mr. McCain said at an event in Downingtown, Pa. “America didn’t become the greatest nation on earth by spreading the wealth,” he said. “We became the greatest nation by creating new wealth.”
After some version of “Joe the Plumber” was mentioned two dozen times during the debate, Mr. Wurzelbacher found news crews outside his home and Katie Couric on the phone.
Mr. Wurzelbacher told reporters that the company he works for, Newell Plumbing & Heating, has two full-time employees: himself and the owner, Al Newell.
Well, there, see over two dozen times - you don't need the transcript now, do you?
Or do you? Here's the main part of the McCain - Obama interchange on Joe [from transcript link, above]:
SCHIEFFER: All right. Would you like to ask him a question?
MCCAIN: No. I would like to mention that a couple days ago Senator Obama was out in Ohio and he had an encounter with a guy who's a plumber, his name is Joe Wurzelbacher.
Joe wants to buy the business that he has been in for all of these years, worked 10, 12 hours a day. And he wanted to buy the business but he looked at your tax plan and he saw that he was going to pay much higher taxes.
You were going to put him in a higher tax bracket which was going to increase his taxes, which was going to cause him not to be able to employ people, which Joe was trying to realize the American dream.
Now Senator Obama talks about the very, very rich. Joe, I want to tell you, I'll not only help you buy that business that you worked your whole life for and be able -- and I'll keep your taxes low and I'll provide available and affordable health care for you and your employees.
And I will not have -- I will not stand for a tax increase on small business income. Fifty percent of small business income taxes are paid by small businesses. That's 16 million jobs in America. And what you want to do to Joe the plumber and millions more like him is have their taxes increased and not be able to realize the American dream of owning their own business.
SCHIEFFER: Is that what you want to do?
MCCAIN: That's what Joe believes.
OBAMA: He has been watching ads of Senator McCain's. Let me tell you what I'm actually going to do. I think tax policy is a major difference between Senator McCain and myself. And we both want to cut taxes, the difference is who we want to cut taxes for.
Now, Senator McCain, the centerpiece of his economic proposal is to provide $200 billion in additional tax breaks to some of the wealthiest corporations in America. Exxon Mobil, and other oil companies, for example, would get an additional $4 billion in tax breaks.
What I've said is I want to provide a tax cut for 95 percent of working Americans, 95 percent. If you make more -- if you make less than a quarter million dollars a year, then you will not see your income tax go up, your capital gains tax go up, your payroll tax. Not one dime. And 95 percent of working families, 95 percent of you out there, will get a tax cut. In fact, independent studies have looked at our respective plans and have concluded that I provide three times the amount of tax relief to middle-class families than Senator McCain does.
OBAMA: Now, the conversation I had with Joe the plumber, what I essentially said to him was, "Five years ago, when you weren't in a position to buy your business, you needed a tax cut then."
And what I want to do is to make sure that the plumber, the nurse, the firefighter, the teacher, the young entrepreneur who doesn't yet have money, I want to give them a tax break now. And that requires us to make some important choices.
The last point I'll make about small businesses. Not only do 98 percent of small businesses make less than $250,000, but I also want to give them additional tax breaks, because they are the drivers of the economy. They produce the most jobs.
MCCAIN: You know, when Senator Obama ended up his conversation with Joe the plumber -- we need to spread the wealth around. In other words, we're going to take Joe's money, give it to Senator Obama, and let him spread the wealth around.
I want Joe the plumber to spread that wealth around. You told him you wanted to spread the wealth around.
The whole premise behind Senator Obama's plans are class warfare, let's spread the wealth around. I want small businesses -- and by the way, the small businesses that we're talking about would receive an increase in their taxes right now.
Who -- why would you want to increase anybody's taxes right now? Why would you want to do that, anyone, anyone in America, when we have such a tough time, when these small business people, like Joe the plumber, are going to create jobs, unless you take that money from him and spread the wealth around.
I'm not going to...
OBAMA: OK. Can I...
MCCAIN: We're not going to do that in my administration.
For a historical rooting, I mentioned Huey P. Long in an earlier Crabgrass posting on the next-to-last debate, "my friends" and all. With links to Long's "Share Our Wealth" and "Every Man a King" speeches. As Wikipedia explains, with links,
Long created the Share Our Wealth program in 1934, with the motto "Every Man a King," proposing new wealth redistribution measures in the form of a net asset tax on large corporations and individuals of great wealth to curb the poverty and crime resulting from the Great Depression.
That distinction is very clear in the Huey Long speeches, and is a concept totally separate from taxing income - be it earned income or capital gains income. Long's suggestion was taxing the underlying fortune, when great in amounts in his times - less so in ours with a cheapened dollar - to lessen great accumulations of wealth and thereby "spread the wealth," while what Obama is really proposing is spreading income tax burdens differently, by restructuring the rates for differing brackets, perhaps creating more high end brackets, etc., but NOT lessening anyone's already accumulated wealth, and he mispoke, using "wealth" in a generic and not a careful sense.
What the Long proposal shows is that taxation is not innate in its rules.
Anything can be taxed, or exempted, or excepted, or subject to a credit; and it's a cliche that the power to tax is the power to destroy, were taxes to become "confiscatory" - a term bandied about where differently wealthy persons may have different notions of what is confiscatory vs. what they'd gladly live with rather than their actual lot in life.
There's Forbes with his flat tax, there are consumption taxes, value added taxes, motor vehicle registration taxes, tariffs to adjust for wage imbalances between countries - in fact anything is fair game, and it has even been suggested that if you drive a car, try to sit, get too cold, or take a walk, imposition of a tax would not be an inconceivable accompanying government gesture.
McCain just wanted to get into name calling because his view is the Bush view, that no sop for the wealthy is bad, and no outcome from it is as bad as adjusting taxes to be fairer to those needing a regular salary or wage to stay alive because they happen to be insufficiently wealthy to live off the earnings of their holding [some might say hoarding] great amounts of wealth itself.
Which candidate offers what's best for you is a voter decision, along with which seems the most cautious and sagacious, and less likely to lead the nation into troubles as the present GOP presidential team has done.