"How many plumbers do you know makin' a quarter million dollars a year?"

I can't not blog about Joe the Plumber, can I? He's the subject of my latest guest-post at HughHewitt.com, the point of which I don't think is particularly profound, but it's apparently too subtle for The One to grasp.

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[Copied here for archival purposes on November 5, 2008, from the post linked above at HughHewitt.com.]

(Guest Post by Bill Dyer a/k/a Beldar)

The title to this post is the mocking, disdainful question that Barack Obama slung at "Joe the Plumber" from a campaign rally on Friday. He thereby proved the aptness of Sen. McCain's Freudian slip when he called Sen. Obama "Senator Government" in the third debate.

Joe Wurzelbacher has never claimed that he makes $250k now. But if Barack Obama thinks there aren't any plumbing business owners in America who do, then that shows how out of touch he is. Mr. Wurzelbacher said he hopes to become successful enough to be in that tax bracket; especially if he ends up growing his business and employing more plumbers to work with and for him, that's entirely plausible.

Why would Barack Obama think that someone running a successful small plumbing business might not be able to make as much as the $273k salary his wife made as an administrator for the University of Chicago Hospitals?

The question isn't what Joe the Plumber makes now, it's what he aspires to make. So he wants to know what incentives for success he'd have under the tax scheme imposed by an Obama Administration working hand-in-glove with Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. Will they justify the hard work, the increased risk? Or will he be looking at a return to the days of confiscatory marginal tax rates, in which every additional dollar he earns is taxed at a steeper and steeper rate, until finally each bit of extra income benefits the government and its welfare recipients more than the man or woman who earned it? Should he reach for his dreams, or should he just content himself to be a 21st Century wage slave, and genuflect toward Washington for the occasional extra government handout he gets in exchange for voting away his dreams?

How sadly ironic — that a candidate whose slogan is "Yes, We Can" and whose autobiography was called "Dreams from My Father" should embrace a tax policy whose slogan should be "Why Bother?" and whose effect could be titled "Dreams from Our Fathers That Government Must Crush."

The most productive people in this country are the ones who are still working toward their dreams. They're the ones who start and run successful businesses. They're the ones who take risks. They save. They invest. They don't redistribute wealth, they create wealth. And here's what modern-day Democrats have never understood, and why they've continually failed to capture their votes: Because they so value their dreams, these most ambitious Americans hate class warfare and wealth redistribution even while they're still notionally part of the "underclass" who will receive some of the spoils when the "rich" are robbed.

Call them by names like John Galt or Joe the Plumber. But don't belittle their dreams and don't mock them for dreaming, Sen. Obama.

— Beldar