Overtaxed.(The Talk of the Town)

The rise and fall of Joe the Plumber as a symbol of the American self-made man's resistance to progressive taxation began on October 12th, outside Toledo, Ohio. As Senator Barack Obama campaigned for the Presidency in a neighborhood of modest homes, a man named Samuel J. (Joe) Wurzelbacher approached. He said that he was getting ready to buy a company that earned about a quarter of a million dollars a year, and he asked if his taxes would rise under Obama's economic plan. The Senator acknowledged that they might. "Nobody likes high taxes," Obama said. "Of course not." Still, he explained:

I do believe that for folks like me who've worked hard but frankly also been lucky, I don't mind paying just a little bit more than the waitress who I just met over there. . . . She can barely make the rent. . . . And I think that when you spread the wealth around, it's good for everybody.

The principle that Obama evinced, which most economists would regard as unexceptionable, can be traced to Adam Smith. In "The Wealth of Nations" (1776), his seminal treatise on capitalism, Smith wrote:

The necessaries of life occasion the great expense of the poor. . . . The luxuries and vanities of life occasion the principal expense of the rich, and a magnificent house embellishes and sets off to the best advantage all the other luxuries and vanities which they possess. . . . It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion.

Smith's notion of reasonableness did not anticipate the Fox News Channel, however. Last Tuesday, Wurzelbacher appeared on that network, where he denounced Obama's comments as "socialist." He said that Obama "scared me," because he "wants to distribute wealth." Wurzelbacher also granted an interview to the advocacy group Family Security Matters, whose advisory board includes the conservative talk-radio hosts Laura Ingraham and Monica Crowley. By means unknown, Joe's story of ambition and resentment reached the campaign of Senator John McCain.

Early in last Wednesday's televised debate, McCain brought up Joe's supposed worries about Obama's proposed tax rates for wealthy Americans and set off one of those cascading episodes of goofiness that sometimes overtake people who are tired. During a prolonged colloquy in which "Joe the Plumber" was invoked more than two dozen times, McCain accused Obama of waging "class warfare." Each office-seeker spoke to Joe, "if you're out there," as if he were a lost child. At one point, McCain referred to Wurzelbacher as "my old buddy Joe, Joe the Plumber," sounding as if he might launch into song.

McCain's reification of Joe's working-class-rooted virtue portended Dreiserian revelations, and, sure enough, reporters quickly discovered that Wurzelbacher was not everything he seemed. He lacked a license to perform plumbing or contracting work; a lien had been filed against him for nonpayment of taxes; and he told Katie Couric, of CBS News, that in truth he is not at present expecting to enter the high tax bracket he had mentioned to Obama. Wurzelbacher's prospects for participating in Sarah Palin's 2012 Joe Six-Pack tour may also have been dented when, speaking to Couric, he described Obama's remarks on tax policy as a "tap dance . . . almost as good as Sammy Davis, Jr."