No! If he bought that business, it would help him. What if his business grew into a million dollar a year business? It would still help him.

Why? Businesses are not taxed on revenues—never. They always get to deduct expenses like paying their employees. This was forgotten by both Joe and Obama in their discussion. Joe's income is about $40,000 now, and it might go up to $100,000, but no way would he make over a quarter million a year, so like 95% of individuals and small businesses he would get a tax break under Obama's plan.

The highest tax bracket in 1954 under Republican President Eisenhower was 90%. Joe and McCain are calling that socialism. Obama plans to raise the top rate from 36% now to 39%—back to where it was in the 1990s. If this is "socialism," the USA in 1954 must have been ultra-socialist. That's just silly. more>>

That's right, Joe got mixed up. He only makes about $40,000 a year, and the business he wants to buy would have revenues of about $250,000--$500,000 a year depending on who you believe. But no business is taxed on its revenues. It's taxed on revenues minus all expenses--on its profits. (Rev. vs. Profit in the NY Times)

Joe would only get taxed more if his own income, net of all business expenses, shot up from $40,000 to over $250,000. This just is not going to happen. No plumbing business, even if it has $500,000 a year in revenues is going to be paying its "chief executive" a quarter of a million per year. And Joe knows this. He was just thinking about business revenues not about his taxable income.

Do you think the person making $12,000 and the one making $12 million a year should pay the same tax rate? If not, then you are for "spreading the wealth around."

As long as we've had income taxes, the rich have paid higher rates than the poor. In fact, most of the time the rich's rates have been much higher. Certainly in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, and long before, the top brackets were far higher.

In the last 25 years tax rates for the riches have been cut more than in half. Obama proposes to raise the two top brackets back to where they were in the 1990s -- to raise them from 33% and 36% to 36% and 39%. Still far lower than they were, say, in the 1950s.

So if Sarah Palin is right that this is socialism, then the U.S. was way socialist under President Eisenhower.

The company McCain said the plumber wants to buy has annual sales of $510,000, according to an analysis by Dun & Bradstreet. That makes it [very] unlikely that Wurzelbacher's purchase would give him a taxable income of more than $200,000 -- leaving him unaffected by Obama's proposal to roll back tax breaks for those earning more than $250,000, said Steven Bankler, a certified public accountant in San Antonio, who counts plumbers and other trade professionals as his clients.

Few such small businesses have enough income to be affected by Obama's tax changes, Bankler said.

One other problem: he would pay just $773 more in taxes under Obama's plan than McCain's if he did earn an adjusted gross income of $280,000, according to an analysis by the Tax Foundation, a Washington research group that is critical of high taxes.

Earning that much would make Wurzelbacher very unusual among small businesses. According to the Internal Revenue Service almost 95 percent of 21.5 million owners of small businesses who file as sole proprietors had receipts under $100,000 in 2007 [and would get a tax cut from Obama's plan].

Another 4 million businesses organize as so-called subchapter S corporations, according to IRS data; less than 5 percent of them earn more than $200,000.

`No Joe Six-Pack'

If Wurzelbacher managed to earn $280,000, ``he's not an average Joe Six-Pack,'' said Gerald Prante, a senior economist at the Tax Foundation. [We need a tax foundation to tell us Joe 6-pack doesn't earn well over a quarter million a year??]