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It's pretty sad that the Republicans are starting to pin their hopes on this guy. If nothing else it shows just how desperate and bereft of ideas they are at the moment (as if the ACORN / Ayers narrative wasn't enough of a clue).
In addition to the article that josh posted, this MSNBC article is pretty enlightening:
| quote: | Wurzelbacher also acknowledged that he had no specific plans for buying Newell’s business, saying he and Newell had simply talked about the idea from time to time. He might have difficulty making the purchase: Court records from his divorce show that Wurzelbacher made $40,000 in 2006.
Even if he did buy Newell Plumbing and Heating, Obama’s tax plan wouldn’t affect him. While Wurzelbacher told Obama that he would be taxed at a higher rate because the company grossed more than $250,000 a year, Ohio business records show the company’s estimated total annual revenue as only $100,000. Actual taxable income would be even less than that. |
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27221645/
Put simply, this guy is either a liar and a shill (the fact that he's a registered Republican and appears quite adept at parrotting Republican talking-points would seem to bear this out) or he is simply self-aggrandising and delusional. To be honest, I'm more inclined to the latter.
The delusion concerning wealth mobility in America is a common one: something like 40% of Americans believe that they will one day be in the top 1% of income-earners. This is a myth (happily peddled by the Republicans, of course) which belies the fact that across all countries there is an inverse correlation between wealth inequality and wealth mobility (link) and there is less social mobility in the US than in the UK and the "socialised" Scandinavian countries (link). I think this is a myth that our friend Joe, based on the response he gave in an interview with Katie Couric, has bought into hook, line and sinker:
| quote: | COURIC: Well, he supposedly will raise taxes only on people who make over $250,000 a year. Would you be in that category?
WURZELBACHER: Not right now at presently, but, you know, question, so he's going to do that now for people who make $250,000 a year. When's he going to decide that $100,000 is too much, you know? I mean, you're on a slippery slope here. You vote on somebody who decides that $250,000 and you're rich? And $100,000 and you're rich? I mean, where does it end? You know, that's - people got to ask that question. |
If it is true that he is only making $40,000 a year into his 40s, then the odds of him ever making $250,000 a year are surely vanishingly slim. He is voting directly against his best interests now based on the false hope that he will one day make it into the top tax-bracket. He's not living the American Dream, he's living an American day-dream.
Part of the problem is undoubtedly the way that the issue of taxation has been so successfully framed by the Republicans in recent history. The Democrats, so the story goes, like to egregiously "tax and spend" the income of "hard-working Americans" and are actively engaged in the process of "wealth redistribution". This is dog-whistle politics at its finest: the implication is that you are a hard worker entitled to the fruits of your labour, whereas they are nothing but lazy welfare-bums, happy to leech off the hard-work of others. This is such a paranoid, cynical world-view, so completely divorced from the reality of the root causes of poverty that it barely merits redressing. However, it is a persistent myth, and one that has been quite effective in convincing poor, white people to vote against their direct interests.
As insiduously effective as this GOP characterisation of Democratic tax policy has been, I don't think that Joe - or any other working-class Americans who have bought into this myth - can be completely exempt from responsibility for their gullibility. This is a bit of a tangent, but there has been a series of interesting posts on this Christian blog recently about why people so credibly buy into misinformation:
| quote: | I used to believe that maybe some people were that stupid. They were acting that stupid, so I went along. I believed that the people I was sending that dossier to were merely innocent dupes.
But in truth they were neither innocent nor dupes. The category of innocent dupe does not apply here. No one could be honestly misled by such a story. The only way to have been misled by it is dishonestly -- which is to say deliberately, willingly and willfully. They are claiming to believe a foolish thing, but they are not guilty of foolishness. They are guilty of malice.
They are just plain guilty.
[...]
This story, as with the many others like it, is spread maliciously. The people spreading it are not fools. They are not suffering from a mental defect, but from a moral one. They have chosen to bear false witness, and they do so knowingly. |
The original post didn't have anything to do with this issue, but I think the maxim is a universal one: people do not accept and propogate such misinformation so readily unless they have an underlying desire to do so. When Obama gives Joe a nuanced answer about increasing the tax burden on those businesses that can most afford it in order to give breaks to small business just starting out (which would include Joe's putative business), it ends up in Joe's mind as evidence of "socialism" and "wealth distribution" within the space of a couple of days (compare this to this). That isn't innocent stupidity, that's malicious ignorance.
This of course begs the question as to why someone would so willingly buy into such misinformation. The blog I mentioned before uses the term "Melon morality" to describe the phenomenon where people invent fictitious monsters to compare themselves down to, in order to aggrandise their own moral disposition:
| quote: | Melon was the character played by Rodney Dangerfield in the movie Back to School, the wealthy owner of a chain of "Tall & Fat" clothing stores whose motto was "If you want to look thin, you hang out with fat people." That approach -- finding people we can compare-down to -- might make us feel a little better about ourselves, but it doesn't change who or what we really are. The Thornton Melon approach might make us look thin, but it won't help us become so. Melon morality is never anything more than an optical illusion.
This comparing-down is ultimately corrosive because it bases our sense of morality in pride rather than in love -- in the cardinal vice instead of the cardinal virtue. And to fuel that pride, we end up looking for ever-more extreme and exotically awful people to compare ourselves favorably against, people whose freakish cruelty makes our own mediocrity show more goodly and attract more eyes than that which hath no foil to set it off. |
By any sense of the word, the life that Joe leads is a mediocre one. If he has bought into the myth that hard-work necessarily translates into wealth, then it would be understandable if he suffers agonising moments in which he questions his self-worth. The simplest and easiest way to allay these doubts is to compare himself down to a ficticious cabal of welfare cheats, who must only be poor because they don't share his work-ethic (which is highlighted in an interview that he gave - which I now cannot find for the life of me - in which he questioned why his wealth should be redistributed to those who don't work as hard as he does).
This need to make a virtue of modest acheivements facilitates a self-aggrandising "optical illusion", where one's own otherwise unremarkable virtues are contrasted with the virtues of a demographic that doesn't actually exist. Poor whites thus vote against their interests, because they have a visceral need to believe that they are not like those poor people, who are content to just mooch off the hard-work of others. People like Joe therefore willingly refuse to recognise the realities of their socio-economic status, because by doing so they would have to necessarily conflate themselves with the people they have invented in order to make themselves look more virtuous.
Given all this, when Obama becomes president and mails Joe that tax credit to get his business off the ground, I hope that he has enough integrity to mail it back, lest he participate in this insidious process of wealth-distribution. Somehow, though, I can't see that happening.
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