October 20, 2008


IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY



MCCAIN'S PHONY CONCERN FOR PLUMBERS


John McCain evidently believes that the road to the presidency is paved with smears, innuendo, lies, and stunts like Joe the Plumber. McCain mentioned "Joe" in the third debate with Barack Obama, claiming that poor Joe would be severely hurt by Obama's tax plan. There were lots of problems with "Joe's" credibility, it turns out. But an examination of the real issue, the tax plan, shows that most plumbers and most working class people in general benefit far more from Obama's plan than would benefit under McCain's trickle down economics. This column by Paul Krugman is at www.nytimes.com:

But what’s really happening to the plumbers of Ohio, and to working Americans in general?

First of all, they aren’t making a lot of money. You may recall that in one of the early Democratic debates Charles Gibson of ABC suggested that $200,000 a year was a middle-class income. Tell that to Ohio plumbers: according to the May 2007 occupational earnings report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average annual income of “plumbers, pipefitters and steamfitters” in Ohio was $47,930.

Second, their real incomes have stagnated or fallen, even in supposedly good years. The Bush administration assured us that the economy was booming in 2007 — but the average Ohio plumber’s income in that 2007 report was only 15.5 percent higher than in the 2000 report, not enough to keep up with the 17.7 percent rise in consumer prices in the Midwest. As Ohio plumbers went, so went the nation: median household income, adjusted for inflation, was lower in 2007 than it had been in 2000.